


Gathering Storms

by Zerrat



Category: Tomb Raider (Video Game), Tomb Raider 2013
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, F/F, Femslash, Possession, Post-Canon, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-02
Updated: 2013-07-07
Packaged: 2017-12-13 18:08:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/827260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zerrat/pseuds/Zerrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of Yamatai, Sam struggles to return to her normal life. Her emotions spinning wildly out of control, Sam finds herself unravelling as the fragments of Himiko's soul within her begin to consume everything that she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Contains: descriptions of violence, fighting, some swearing, and descriptions of mental trauma. 
> 
> Welcome to _Gathering Storms_ , everyone! This beast began as a post-canon 'what if' sort of ficlet that grew some rather gnarly fangs and latched onto me, hard. It's based around the idea that, despite Lara's best efforts, Himiko's soul was partially transferred to Sam - enough that those fragments could then grow to become a major issue some months down the line. 
> 
> At the risk of spoiling the fic any further, that's all I'll say. 
> 
> This fic has six chapters to it, five of which are completed. It'll be updated on a weekly schedule for those wondering. 
> 
> A huge thank you to both [fmorgana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fmorgana) for all her encouragement and hard work as my beta, and to [Accidental_Overlord](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidental_Overlord) for helping me think outside the box. Thank you, both of you, for making my life _so much harder_. XD
> 
> I hope everyone enjoys what adventures we've come up for you, and as always, comments and feedback is very much appreciated.

The remainders of the _Endurance's_ crew were picked up by a cargo vessel bound for Tokyo. Given the sorry state of their supplies, it had been a good thing, too. After a warm meal and a hot shower, Sam had slumped on the bottom bunk of the cabin she'd been given to share with Lara, and had tried to get some seriously needed rest.

Lara was still with the ship's doctor, and had been there for a few hours now. Sam tried to ignore the feeling of all-too distracting worry gnawing at her stomach.

 _Lara is gonna be okay,_ Sam told herself as she stared at the bottom of the bunk above her, her hands tucked behind her head while she tried to will herself to sleep. _I mean, if Yamatai didn't kill her..._

The injuries had looked so extensive though, and Sam had caught sight of the mottling of bruises over Lara's ribs when Jonah had tried to patch her up a little after they'd left Yamatai's waters. That puckered, weeping and angry red wound on her side had been practically the size of Sam's own palm, and the colour had slowly been sucked from Lara's face as the adrenaline faded.

 _Lara nearly killed herself for me,_ Sam had realised. In the silence of the cargo ship, she couldn't escape from the harsh reality of what had happened on Yamatai.

Every creak of the ship around her seemed to drag across her frayed and exhausted nerves. Panic would well up inside her, and for a few terrifying heartbeats, she was back in the Solarii fortress. The Solarii had caught her with the radio, and Nikolai had roared at her in Russian before throwing her against the splintering palace wall. His hands had wrapped about her throat, her vision had darkened, and then he'd spoken.

"We may need to keep you alive, but there are so many fates worse than death."

But Yamatai was _over_. Lara had scaled the mountain, ended Mathias and burned Himiko. So why hadn't the nightmares ended? Sam felt like - like she'd been nothing but a gullible idiot that whole time, and now she was paying the price for her ignorance.

During their early days on the voyage, Alex had mentioned Japanese government cover-ups and conspiracies. They'd all laughed it off, like it'd been a joke. None of them had been prepared for the horrifying reality of Yamatai. Alex and so many others were dead at the bottom of the island's reefs or murdered by the Solarii.

Once upon a time, Himiko had even been one of Sam's childhood idols. She'd looked up to the almost mythological figure, because who wouldn't have wanted to be a queen with magical powers? The stories had been so wrong about the Sun Queen, and so had Sam's grandmother.

It filled Sam with a cynical bitterness - cold reality had taken those childhood dreams and smashed them into pieces in front of her. Sam slung her arm across her eyelids, exhaling and trying to ignore the way her breath shook.

Crying wasn't going to do her any good, Sam knew that, but she couldn't seem to convince her body.

The almost whimsical legends that her grandmother had told her as a child had hinted at nothing of the rage and sheer _sadism_ that Sam had sensed on that island. Himiko had hated everything with a blind obsessiveness - Solarii, Stormguard, and the whole damn world

Even having sensed all of that background static of Himiko's anger and hatred, nothing had prepared Sam for the full onslaught of emotion that flooded into her mind when Mathias had linked them together in the ascension ritual. The only way Sam could describe it now was that it had been like an avalanche of power.

The terrifying memory of the ritual made Sam's breath catch in her throat almost painfully. Along with that power had come emotion, and Sam had experienced everything as if she'd been Himiko herself. She'd hated _everything_ with the same intensity that Himiko had - she'd even hated Lara. Maybe that was the worst part of it all.

She'd genuinely wanted Lara to fall, ripped from the mountain by the storms Himiko had summoned. It made her feel ill and untrustworthy. Sam rolled over to stare at the barred door of the cabin room, and she could feel her heart pounding against her ribcage.

It had been during the ritual that Sam had understood exactly what was happening - that the Sun Queen had been very much alive in that decaying, partially preserved body.

Himiko - whatever was left of her - had been completely mad, and had been that way for a very long time.

Sam kept trying to tell herself that it was over, and that the ritual had ended before the transferral had been completed. Some of her still wondered if she'd been infected by Himiko's bone-deep madness anyway, especially given the way she kept cycling through her own failures and nightmares obsessively -

Lara still wasn't back yet. No matter how much Sam needed her there, needed Lara to talk to her and to convince her that it was over and that the Sun Queen was really gone - there was really nothing for it.

It took some time for Sam to will herself into an uneasy sort of sleep, and it didn't surprise her in the slightest that her dreams were full of anger, twisted bodies and blood on the wooden palace floor.

###

_The ancient palace smelled about as old as it actually was. The floorboards were rotten, the very structure of the building compromised, and Sam could hear it sway and creak in the wind as she stood at the open window._

_Yamatai stretched out before her, deserted and abandoned. Sam knew with certainty that she was alone in the world, and she looked up into endless blue sky._

###

When Sam woke up in her narrow hospital bed, everything was dark. The walls felt close and the entire room felt almost claustrophobic - Sam had sat bolt upright in her bed, almost paralysed in fear. The air-conditioned air felt freezing on her sweat-slicked skin, and after a few tense moments, she buried her face in her hands.

 _Nightmares seem to be the story of my nights now,_ Sam thought miserably. Things hadn't exactly gotten much better since they'd left Yamatai and returned to Japan, and the awful feelings and horrible nightmares that Sam had hoped were just temporary had lingered on.

Her restless dreams were filled with harsh voices in Russian, tortured bodies, fire and gunshots. Those things were all terrible, but the worst part was always the Sun Queen. In the dead of the night, as Sam struggled to regain her bearings after a nightmare and blindly reached for her phone or camera... It really felt like Himiko was still there in her mind, sharing poisonous emotion as she pulled Sam apart at the seams -

Sam sucked in a shallow, painful breath. The air felt way too cold and thin, and it reminded her of the mountain air on Yamatai. She made her decision quickly - it felt like she was going _insane_. She had to get out of there and away from her dimly lit room where the Sun Queen's corpse seemed to wait in every shadow.

Her breath coming in short gasps, Sam swung her legs over the edge of the narrow hospital bed and pulled her IV line free with a shaky jerk.

Sam needed to see someone that she knew she could trust - Reyes, Jonah, _Lara_ -

She made her way down the dimly lit hallways, wondering if she was just imagining the feeling of being watched or the crawling feeling of wrongness in the pit of her stomach. That feeling of mindless terror seemed to ignite like a firestorm in her chest. What if something actually _was_ wrong? What if Mathias was somehow alive and was going to kill Lara as she slept, what if he was going to grab Sam and drag her back to Yamatai again? Those thoughts spurred her on faster, until she was nearly running down the quiet corridors of the hospital.

Swallowing her growing terror, Sam made her way toward the room she knew Lara had been placed in before the doctors had taken her in for surgery. Sam had memorized the number, and that deeply anxious part of her mind had been certain that she'd need it. As she skidded to a halt outside the room that Lara was _supposed_ to have been returned to - Sam shook her head, feeling ill. The bed was empty and freshly made, and the room was bare of all of Lara's possessions. Her heart pounding, Sam turned around and began to run again.

Where the hell had Lara gone? Suddenly those paranoid thoughts about Mathias and the Solarii seemed less crazy. She feverishly checked every room for her missing best friend, the one who had been with her through it all and would understand exactly what Sam was so scared of -

She finally found Lara's room at the end of the hallway, and sagged against the doorframe in exhausted relief. There she was, unconscious, drugged from her operations and seemingly bandaged from head to toe - but there was no Mathias there to cut Lara's throat from ear to ear, and no corpse of a queen in the shadows.

Lara was still safe from Yamatai and Himiko's insane rage, and so was Sam.

If only she could bring herself to believe in that truth...

She lingered in the doorway, feeling conflicted as she watched Lara sleep. As much as Sam needed the comfort of her best friend's steadying presence, Lara also desperately needed her rest and she objectively understood that.

Sam was going to have to deal with this awful feeling in her gut on her own, and her throat began to feel raw and tight again. She didn't know what to do - she didn't know how to cope. How had Lara kept it together so well? What was wrong with _Sam_?

She couldn't bring herself to leave the room, and she shakily crossed the space to occupy the seat at Lara's bedside. Even if Lara wasn't awake to help her, the world didn't seem nearly so stark or terrifying, and maybe that was enough.

When Sam awoke at some early hour in the morning, she knew without looking up that Lara had awoken long before her. In spite of herself - and the fact that it was _Lara_ \- Sam sprang away from the mattress, crossing her arms against her chest and feeling blood rush to her cheeks.

"I just - I couldn't sleep and I -" Sam could hear herself trying to say, a million excuses racing through her mind in a blur. None of them seemed like the excuses of someone even remotely sane, so Sam shut her mouth and looked off to the side to retain as much dignity as she had left.

She could feel Lara's eyes on her, and it was weird to realize that her gaze had never before felt so _weighty_.

"Oh Sam. Come here." Lara smiled then, lifting her arms just a little and the invitation had been as clear as it had ever been.

Sam swallowed her pain and darted forward, wrapping her arms around Lara bandaged chest and shoulders in a tight hug that she wanted to last forever. Things felt so simple when she held onto Lara. The shadows in her mind seemed to ease, and some deep and frightened part of her mind felt a little less painful. Sam exhaled into the crook of Lara's neck, smelling disinfectant and cotton overlaying the familiar warmth.

 _So long as I've got her,_ Sam repeated to herself silently as she felt Lara give her a reassuring squeeze, _Maybe things will turn out okay after all._

It was then, really, that she began to wonder exactly what it was she was feeling for her friend.

###

_The old palace on Yamatai was deserted. Sam knew that she should have been bothered by that, but as she leaned out through the wide windows, she found that she couldn't summon the will to care. After all, she'd badly needed a bit of peace and quiet. The onslaught of the media and everything else had been close to suffocating._

_The endless hounding, the slews of scientists, historians and even business corporations... It all seemed so far away as Sam looked up into those endless blue skies. Wisps of cloud had started to form, though, and they grew thicker and darker as Sam watched._

_She shivered, a sudden chill forming in the air as the breeze picked up - what was going on?_

_When she glanced down to her hand, a red thread was tied about her finger in a looping but expertly tied knot. It didn't seem tight, though, and Sam's gaze followed the string until it passed over the windowsill and out the side of the old palace. From there, Sam couldn't make out anything._

_She looked up again, crossing her arms against her chest and hugging her robes about herself tighter. The sky was darkening, and a storm was coming._

_Sam tugged experimentally on the red string, and it gave easily. Satisfied with that, Sam hurried deeper inside the old palace._

###

The anger was the first thing that felt a little off to Sam, and in retrospect, she should have put the pieces together back then. The anger was both sudden and fierce, and it was mostly directed toward petty things that normally she'd never paid any attention to.

Once, Sam had a missed cab. The next time, someone had unthinkingly gotten in her way in the street, and then she'd received a latte instead of a flat white. She wished that it had simply ended at "petty and embarrassing" things, but the situation had only spiralled downward from there.

Sam's father - who had been so proud of her for making it out of Yamatai, and with a story that captured the world's imagination to boot - had started to disengage from her. Her mother hadn't said a word to her since Sam had thrown her new phone across the room, and no matter what she did, she felt more and more alone. She'd acted out before, of course, but half the time it had been a cry for attention from her less-than-present parents. Not _actual destructive impulses_ that she could barely control!

This time took the cake, though. Her father had set up an interview with with one of his favoured journalists, and Sam hadn't exactly gone into it without knowledge. On paper, she'd been more than happy for the chance to sell her story of what happened on Yamatai - but she'd signed that paper over a week ago.

A week ago, things had not been _like this_. Somehow, things had changed, and five minutes into the scripted interview, Sam had just snapped. It was the false way the journalist had given her his sympathies for the dead, and had then gone on to insinuate things about excessive force and murder.

In her own eyes, her reaction - throwing her glass of water in the journalist's face before slapping him - had been completely justified. Nobody had moved to stop her as she'd stormed out of her father's news studio, and given the way her mood had blackened in what felt like seconds, it was probably for the best.

 _I just need a bit of fresh air,_ Sam told herself desperately as she made it out past the glass doors of the studio lobby and into the throngs of people in the street outside. Even out here in the crisp fall air, Sam felt like she couldn't breathe, and the tang of gas in the air and smoke from the oncoming traffic made her think of a burning, ancient palace.

 _A lot of air,_ Sam amended, feeling sick to her stomach as the people streamed on past her. She looked around her, and up at the skyscraper stretching on above her, before she started to run.

They - her father, the journalists that had been hounding her since she'd left hospital, even the people on the street - they had no idea of what a hellhole Yamatai had been.

They had no idea of what it had _done_ to her, or of how close it had come to killing all of them. Lara had done what she'd had to do, and friends - people Sam had grown to love - had kept on dying. People like that reporter and all the historians hounding her had no idea of how Lord of the Flies the place had been, where men had been reduced to killers all in the name of the Sun Queen. People like her father and the reporters had no idea of what it felt like to have a crazy demi-god lodged in their mind, even for just a little while.

They still didn't understand what it had done to Lara - Lara, who would always carry the scars the Solarii and the Sun Queen had given her.

Sam slowed to a stop, her breath harsh and raw in her throat while her eyes burned with angry tears.

Lara, who was already planning another trip to escape from the scrutiny, another adventure into the unknown. She'd been looking at maps en route to Tokyo, after they'd been picked up by the cargo ship, and Sam had figured it out. Sam still wasn't sure how she felt about that - that Yamatai had burned away the Lara Croft she'd gone to UCL with, and that the island had awakened something brutal, awful and desperate in her closest friend.

 _God._ Sam wasn't sure if she even felt properly at all, with all of her emotions buried under this stupidly hair-trigger temper of hers.

Lara hadn't asked Sam to go, nor had Sam asked to accompany her. She hadn't even asked for details - wasn't even supposed to _know_. It was the elephant in the room when Sam had stopped by her motel room the last time.

Sam kept telling herself that she understood, that no matter how bad things were in Sam's head, it wasn't Lara's problem to fix her. She kept telling herself that she loved Lara too much to drag her back to Yamatai, not when she seemed so determined to put those horrors behind her.

No matter what she kept telling herself, none of it made her _feel_ any better and she had hurled her new video camera across her room. She'd rushed to pick it back up, but the old card inside was damaged and her files on Yamatai had become corrupted. She'd lost everything that remained of that trip.

The whole experience had been for _nothing_.

Conflicted, angry and _hurt_ , Sam didn't see Lara off on her new expedition either.

It was only when Sam looked at herself, the pieces of her new camera in her hands and wiping helpless, angry tears on her sleeve, that she realised that she wasn't coping. It was a stunning moment of clarity in what had felt like endless, fuzzy anger.

Sam needed help, because Yamatai was poisoning her.

###

The shrinks that Sam ended up seeing - both paid for and hushed up by her dad's seemingly bottomless bank account - told her that it was classic PTSD. They talked about murder, torture, warfare, and how it was 'understandable' that she'd find herself angry, lost and confused by all that had happened. They linked everything neatly back to Mathias and the Solarii, and the atrocities that the work crews kept unearthing on Yamatai now.

Sam could understand those conclusions, she really did, because who was going to believe that the worst of it came from being mind-raped into near-submission by an immortal sorceress that had been trapped for a millennia in a decaying body?

It was crazy, even when Sam herself looked back, and she'd _been_ there.

Sam was given strict instructions by the men with cold eyes and false smiles - she had to talk about her issues, discuss it with her loved ones, search for the flashpoint to her rage. She was meant to question things, keep a diary, and she had to call those same shrinks when 'things became too much'. It was all so damn complicated, but none of it ever seemed to help her. Not when she really needed it, when she woke up sweating and biting down on the inside of her cheek to keep herself from screaming.

None of what the shrinks told her helped the crawling memory of another _thing_ in her head, mad and sapping away at the control she held over her own body while she wished death on her best friend.

Sam was pretty damn _sure_ PTSD never involved any of that.

She wasn't sure what to do - who to talk to, what to say, what would get her help and what would get her dragged off into a psychiatric ward to live out another horror film of a different variety.

Her first thought was - as always, it seemed these days - Lara. Lara was gone, though, off on another adventure and Sam had no way of reaching out for her now.

A reluctant but fast-growing part of Sam hated Lara for not being there, to save her once again when it felt so much like she was _drowning_ alone.

###

_She dreamed more frequently of that ancient palace, the Solarii fortress where she had been kept by Mathias for 'safe-keeping'. The whole situation had been about as safe as Russian Roulette. In her dreams, it was thankfully empty of the insane zealots, and she could no longer hear the screams of the tortured._

_Even so, the palace seemed all the more threatening in its deadly silence, and Sam had seen enough horror films to understand that things were 'too quiet'._

_Outside, Sam could hear the gathering storms as thunder rumbled and the winds continued to gather speed, and she made her way deeper inside the palace to escape it. She wasn't really sure where she was meant to be going, but she continued on regardless, the rotting floorboards creaking dangerously underfoot and the sound of the storms fading from earshot._

_Almost without realising it, Sam had found her way back to the old throne room - as she entered through the heavy double doors, she remembered that it had been here that Lara had rescued her the first time. With a bone-deep bitterness that surprised her, Sam knew that Lara would not be there to save her now._

_She made a slow circuit of the throne room, her gaze sliding over the rows and rows of red candles set up against the walls in the Solarii's tribute to the Sun Queen. It was only when she heard the floorboards shift behind her that Sam whirled and looked toward the head of the throne room._

_The Sun Queen was propped up on the shattered throne, her partially preserved body now rotting again in the warmth of the palace. The smell was overwhelming, and the room was filled with flies -_

_Red, silken thread was wrapped around Himiko's decomposing hand, mirroring the thread still knotted all about Sam's own. The Sun Queen's head rolled to the side, looking jerkily down at the red thread, as if considering it with her blank, empty eye sockets. She raised her hand, and Sam could see in gruesome detail how the thread had been wound through very flesh and those exposed, yellowing bones. Sam felt a flood of overwhelming terror as she felt her own hand raise into the air, completely unbidden._

_Sam's breath came in ragged, desperate gasps as she stared into where Himiko's eyes should have been, and outside, she could hear the storm raging and lashing at the wooden palace._

_But that thing on the throne room wasn't Himiko, not really, and not the one in control of the thread. Sam knew it with the certainty that only came from dreams._

_"Many have given up their souls willingly for this," Mathias had said, and it resonated in Sam's head._

_The palace shuddered under her feet as lightning cracked overhead, and Sam backed out of the throne room, away from the thing on the throne, and she ran with everything she had._

###

When Sam awoke from the dream, it took her a few long moments to realise that she wasn't clamping down on her lower lip - and that she wasn't screaming. Something felt horribly wrong, though. She turned the light at her bedside on, climbed out of bed and walked over to the mirror.

Her skin crawled and she clapped a hand over her mouth, her breath growing ragged and fast.

She was smiling - no, it was far worse because she was _grinning._ It took the rest of the night for Sam to rid herself of it, and in the pale hours of the morning as her face finally relaxed, she wondered if she was going crazy after all.

###

It was almost two months after everything in Yamatai went to hell that Sam's new cell buzzed in her pocket. Lara's familiar email address came up on her screen as Sam drew it out with short and shaky movements. She hadn't heard from Lara since she'd left on her latest adventure, and hadn't expected to for a long time. A big part of her just wanted to delete the email without reading it, but their battered bond of friendship won out in the end.

Lara was coming back to Tokyo, the email said in the familiar, almost rambling way Sam had memorised from their days back in college. Lara said that she had loads to share with Sam about what she'd done and where she'd been. More than that, Lara had _missed_ Sam so much, and could they see one another since it had been so long?

As Sam had stared down at the cell's screen, she felt like she was torn between a million emotions. It was a war inside her between warm affection and cold, aching hatred. She didn't understand how it had even gotten to that point - how she could have gone from trusting in Lara and needing her, to outright hating her and wanting to turn their friendship to dust.

 _Maybe it's better if I just say 'thanks but no thanks', that I'm busy,_ Sam idly wondered, even if she'd made no plans and did not intend to. _Maybe it'll be better to accept, show up and act like nothing is wrong._

Sam's grip on her phone tightened, and she stared down at the brightly lit screen without really seeing. Sam resented Lara for leaving, and the toxic emotion that had been so carefully dammed up in her chest hadn't ever felt to clear to her before.

 _Maybe I'll ask her 'why',_ Sam thought, a little savagely. _Why did you abandon me? Why didn't you stay and **help** me, instead of running away to wherever the hell you went to hide?_

Maybe she wanted to beg Lara for help. After all, Lara was the only one who really knew what insanity had gone on up in the monastery, who understood the nature of the connection that had been formed between Himiko and Sam.

Sam needed to talk to someone who wouldn't try to drug her out of her mind if she told them that she suspected Himiko was still _in_ her head, lurking under the surface and in her very dreams. She needed to talk to someone who would get that it wasn't just echoes of memories left over from the ritual, but something far more sinister...

No matter how toxically _angry_ she felt with Lara, there was still something horribly wrong with her. Sam tapped out a quick response and hit send before she could reconsider - before whatever lurked in her mind could make her second-guess herself.

If anyone could help her, could make sense of whatever was wrong with Sam, it was Lara. It was the only truth of the world that Sam had any remaining faith in.

###

The weather was dreary and bleak when Sam arrived at the Narita International Airport. The likeness of the weather to her mood was not a coincidence lost on her. The light, misty rain that had started up not five minutes after she'd arrived on the open-air observation deck had already soaked through her jacket, hair and shirt, and she really wished she'd had the forethought to bring an umbrella.

Sam tucked her hands further into the pockets of her jacket, and she shivered without actually feeling the cold. The observation deck around her was packed with people in spite of the disgusting weather. Everything - the wind, the rain, the rapid conversations of the people standing beside her as another plane landed on the runway - faded in and out. _Sam_ faded in and out, caught up in the whirlwind of her own emotion.

The feeling of volatility from when she'd received Lara's first email had flooded back in force as she watched the planes taxi down onto the runways. It brewed in her like an approaching storm, and had only grown worse as she'd learned of Lara's flight encountering more and more delays.

 _Lara._ When the name came to mind, Sam was filled with... the feeling of having been abandoned, flowing through to anger. But buried deep under that was love, dizzying and intense.

Sam remembered the old cliche, about absence making the heart grow fonder - but the thought was jumbled and unclear, half the words in her mind coming from an old dialect of Japanese that Sam has never spoken and yet somehow knew instinctively.

 _What's happening to me?_ Sam asked herself, watching another plane accelerate down the runway but not really seeing it at all. The old Japanese, the dreams, the _anger_ \- she already knew the answer.

Lara could help her, though. On Yamatai and even before all that, Lara had always been there for Sam.

_Except for the part where Lara left me here for Himiko._

The abandonment, even if it had been completely unknowing on Lara's part, still hurt. The feeling rose up rapidly in Sam's chest, choking her like bony fingers wrapped around her throat -

The storms formed above them all without warning even as Sam shook herself to dispel the feeling. The grey clouds growing black and heavy, and thunder rumbled like an approaching landslide. Sam looked up, her breath hitching in her throat as she caught sight of the next plane, the dark shadows of the storm forming about it like a grasping hand as it began to land. It was far too late for the plane to pull out of the landing.

_Oh god. Oh no._

Sam had no real way of knowing, but with a sudden nausea, she just _knew_ that that was the plane that Lara was on. Raw terror rose up in her chest, and she clasped both of her hands over her mouth in horror as lightning cracked through the air behind the plane. 

The plane landed roughly, and it skidded and wove on the slick tarmac until finally, it came to a shuddering halt. Smoke poured from one of the engines, and the tail of the plane was on fire. 

Unbidden, Sam felt the muscles in her face draw back in a rictus, mad grin at the sight, and her mind went blank with horror. 

The lightning, the sudden storm - it was a line in the sand, and Himiko's declaration of war on Sam herself. The threat was clear. Himiko could summon a storm to kill all of the innocent people around her - god, Lara too - and Sam wouldn't be able to stop her. 

Sam had to leave the airport, had to forget her arrangement to give Lara a ride to her hotel, had to forget begging her friend for help. 

She knew where Himiko wanted her to go, and she couldn't waste a single moment.

###

Sam packed her bags feverishly and lightly, taking only the necessities because time was fleeing her at a rate that Sam could hardly believe. God only knew how long Sam had before Himiko rose up again to swallow her - worse, she didn't know how long her parents would be out for. 

No matter what she did or how fast she moved, Sam kept losing chunks of time and she had no idea of what was happening in those moments. She held onto her sense of self with her fingernails, and her acceptance of the Sun Queen's direction - _run_ \- was making things both better and worse. 

Sam had just finished stuffing an odd assortment of clothing into her bag when she heard a voice calling out from somewhere inside the Nishimura building. Every muscle in Sam's body froze, and her hands began to shake. 

Sam would have recognised that voice anywhere - from all of her fondest dreams and worst nightmares. 

Lara.

_Please, please don't hurt her. I'm doing what you want, just **please** don't hurt Lara._

Sam felt herself smile.

###

Sam's back was to the door when Lara finally found her. Lara had spent a good few minutes jogging through the over-sized and seemingly empty Nishimura building, before she finally arrived at Sam's apartment.

Maybe Sam had been sick, Lara had thought - maybe that was why Sam hadn't showed up at the airport. But it was just so unlike Sam not to have at least sent a message... She'd been sure that "meet you at the airport" was what Sam had sent to her. Instead of the reunion that Lara had been so looking forward to, the plane had had such a rocky landing. She'd felt tense for a good few minutes as she'd gripped the armrest of her chair, feeling sick with the too-sharp memory of the Sun Queen bringing the helicopter down, but in the end it somehow had worked itself out. When she'd landed, though, Sam had been nowhere to be found. 

Lara had waited for a while, wondering if Sam had simply forgotten - she'd been strangely subdued in the few emails they'd exchanged - but when Sam had failed to answer Lara's follow-up call, she'd headed for the Nishimura building that Sam had set herself up in. 

When she'd finally come across Sam, Lara couldn't help but feel a surge of relief. 

Lara had to admit that she had been a little worried, but if Sam was home, then she was safe. 

_Wait a moment,_ Lara told herself, the darkness of Sam's unlit room beginning to resolve itself into detail at last. The room was a total mess, with clothing, paper documents and even camera parts strewn haphazardly about the floor. That was not like Sam, either - when they'd been to school together, Sam had always been tidy, if ultimately unorganized.

That was two strikes, two things that were very unlike Sam in quick succession. That survival instinct Lara had relied so heavily on, starting back at Yamatai, flared to life with sickening intensity, and immediately, Lara knew that things were definitely not okay. 

_Is it Yamatai?_ Lara wondered, shaking head as she approached Sam quietly. Abruptly, Lara felt a prickle of guilt - she'd been so focused on looking to the future and leaving Yamatai behind, on running towards that next adrenaline rush to lose herself in that she'd forgotten Sam. 

That wasn't right of her, but if she worked to solve the unknown to take it out before it killed more of the people she loved - her parents, Grim, Roth, Alex and so very nearly Sam - then maybe things would be okay. She'd thought that maybe a good offence would make a great defence, as well.

Lara realised that she had been an idiot to believe that it would solve everything, but at the time it had seemed like the best way forward. 

Sam was packing though, Lara noticed suddenly. Why? The motions were jerky and uncontrolled, and it rang alarm bells that Lara couldn't quite understand. 

What exactly did she have to fear from Sam, of all people?

"Sam, I thought you were going to meet me at the airport?" Lara tried, careful to make her tone light and almost playful. She wished with a sudden fierceness that Sam would look around, that she'd smile and grab Lara in one of those all-too affectionate hugs. 

There was no answer from Sam, and Lara cast another eye over her in the darkened room. Sam's shoulders were hunched and defensive, and there was a tenseness to her actions that seemed so _off._ The pieces tried to slot together in Lara's mind, but there was some vital bit of the puzzle missing. 

Regardless, Sam was not okay. 

_God,_ Lara thought, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment as she rallied herself. _What exactly has gone on here while I've been gone?_

"Sam," Lara said again, because getting Sam talking to her was the first step. "Please talk to me. What's going on?"

Sam didn't answer, but her movements had stilled and that had to count for something.

"Sam-"

"Lara, _please_ just go." Sam's dismissal of her - cold, but so _scared_ sounding - made the hair rise on the back of Lara's neck, but she refused to back down as she laid a hand on Sam's shoulder. Sam tensed at the contact when she never would have before, and something broke in Lara. 

"Whatever it is, Sam, I'm here for you. You know that -"

Lara did not expect the lightning. It was by gut instinct alone that Lara threw herself back as the window in front of Sam lit up like a beacon and exploded inward. It showered Lara with shards of hot glass and charred brick as she impacted on the ground painfully. The fall set Lara's mending ribs afire again, and she could smell the sharp tang of ozone and smoke - but she played dead, a skill that had gotten her out of trouble more times than she could count. 

She could feel glass all over her. The shards had gotten in her clothing, caught in her hair, and some of them had bitten in deeply. No matter the pain, Lara still didn't dare to so much as breathe as storms rumbled outside the broken window.

She cracked an eyelid open as Sam swept past her, not even pausing to see if she was alive or dead.

 _Oh god._ Lara did not like where her gut was telling her things were going, and it was only when she heard the door to Sam's apartment slam shut that she pushed herself onto her hands and knees and shook the shards of glass from her body and clothing. 

She buried her face in her blood-streaked hands, her breath coming hard.

"Sam... Oh god, _Sam,_ what's happened to you?"

###

_Sam was running through the ancient palace, stumbling as the old wood gave under her feet with every desperate step. The red thread was tight around her hand, digging in deep until it almost cut the skin, but still Sam ran and tore at it._

_The foundations of the old palace shook as thunder rumbled outside, and Sam wondered, for a few breathless and desperate moments, whether the entire structure would just collapse all around her._

_Sam's breath caught as she spied flickering fluorescent light spilling from one of the doorways down the darkened corridor to Sam's right. It was so bizarrely out of place when compared with the candle light and decorative timber, that she ran for it immediately._

_As she approached the room, she noticed that it wasn't even constructed like the rest of the Yamatai palace at all - the door swung open on heavy, iron hinges, and it was built from reinforced steel._

_It was a door that Sam recognized from the _Endurance_ , and as she darted into the room, the door slammed shut behind her. She spun as she heard gears lock into place, her heart in her throat. No matter how hard she pulled at it, none of the levers so much as moved, and a little out of breath, Sam looked over her shoulder at the room she'd found herself trapped in. _

_It wasn't just a room from the Endurance, it was the actual room that she had shared with Lara on the ship, before the Sun Queen had torn it all apart. Sam had no idea what to think, had no idea what it all meant._

_Everything seemed in order, with not even an article of clothing out of place. Sam trailed her fingers over the ladder, over sturdy bunks bolted to the wall of the room. If she hadn't just been running through that old palace just moments before, if her hand wasn't still wrapped tightly in red string, Sam might have been fooled into believing that it was all real._

_As it was, the room made her feel... safe._

_Sam sank down onto the bottom bunk - Lara's, Sam realised vaguely - and with a jolt she realised that a battered, mud-streaked camera was propped up on Lara's pillow. Sam took it in her hands quickly, folding out the LED screen and hitting the play button._

_The video began to play, blurry and indistinct at first as Sam settled herself back on the bunk. It was a video of her life - of her parents, her childhood. She saw her first day attending a private boarding school after years of tutoring, saw herself sitting around with her grandmother as she heard the story of the Sun Queen and Yamatai for the hundredth time. She acted out, played the rebel to hurt her parents and catch just a bit of attention no matter what it was for. The video blurred and jumped, repeating some sections several times and skipping past other things entirely._

_She saw her days in at the last boarding school she attended - a last chance, and a new beginning. She saw it more clearly, and the video flickered back and forth over the day she'd first run headlong into Lara on the grounds. Sam watched her cooling coffee bursting free all over her hand and jacket as she'd bounced off of Lara, and the sight of Lara wincing, apologising and helping Sam to her feet seemed even more vivid than Sam recalled._

_Sam watched the video run through Lara offering her own jacket to replace the one of Sam's she'd helped ruin. Even on film, the way Lara smiled, open, caring, so focused on Sam and Sam alone, still made her heart thump oddly in retrospect. At the time, she'd brushed Lara off with a sneer and a rude gesture regardless._

_Lara hadn't been put off. Stunningly, she'd had gone on to become Sam's best friend. Even from the start, she'd always been there to lend Sam a helping hand._

_But Lara had also taken the Endurance to Yamatai, and had set them all up to face the horrors of the island. Even though Lara had had no way of knowing what they'd sailed into, she had still been there to make things right, and she had still done her damnedest to make sure Sam made it off the island._

_Sam thought that, maybe, she could spend forever just wrapped up in her memories of her childhood and her friendship with Lara. She could let herself admire that kindness, passion, flexibility and hidden steel. It was better than reality._

_Mathias and the Solarii, the Sun Queen and the storms... Sam didn't want to think about all of that anymore. After having spent so long fighting back the unseen, she wondered if maybe it was time to rest._

_Sam let herself get drawn into the video of herself and Lara backpacking around Europe, and forgot all about the ancient palace coming down around her head._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lara isn't sure what's going on with Sam. She only knows that she has to pursue - even if it means she has to go back to Yamatai.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thank you to both [fmorgana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fmorgana) for the crazy amount of work that she puts in to get this fic a bit more polished up than normal, and also to [Accidental_Overlord](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidental_Overlord) for her assistance with developing some of the plot.

Lara wasted barely a moment before she sprang towards the window, the glass shards crunching beneath her boots as she craned out to look at the busy streets below. The storms that had hit Tokyo had grown even worse, and she had to raise her hand to shield her eyes as she desperately searched the darkness and wind-driven rain for Sam. She spotted her best friend in a flash of lightning, and worse, she'd managed to hail a damn cab. 

Lara cursed to herself, springing back from the window, charging out of the messy apartment and taking the stairs three at a time. Her ears were still ringing from the explosion when the lightning had struck the side of the tall building of office spaces and apartments, a distraction she could do without. As she ran for the door, Lara could feel her blood growing cold and sticky on her face and arms, but at least she couldn't feel any pain yet. That was good - she could focus on what needed to be done, then. 

Her heart was racing as she sprinted out of the lobby of the Nishimura building, but her nerves felt like they had turned to steel as she rode the familiar adrenaline rush. She made it down to the gates just as Sam's cab pulled away, and she skidded to a halt at the curb.

"Shit," Lara gasped out, wiping her soaking hair out of her eyes and staring after the cab as the storm continued to drench her. "What the hell do I do now?"

A crowd of people had started to mill around the Nishimura building, some of them pointing up at the smoking crater in the side. Things were getting out of hand, Lara knew, but Sam had to be her primary concern. She looked back towards where the cab had merged with the busy city traffic. 

There was really only one thing for it - Lara knew that she had to pursue. 

Sam had packed her bags before Lara had even arrived. The question of "why" would need to wait - Lara had to work out "where" or even "how" first. With her bottomless pit of a credit card, Sam could buy a ticket for a next flight to anywhere in the world. That was an obvious option, but Lara didn't believe that would be what Sam would do. She'd been shaking, Lara remembered. Whatever it was that had made Sam run, it had also frightened her badly.

Lara's gut instinct had told her "Yamatai", just before a freak bolt of lightning had hit the side of the Nishimura building. It was all connected, and Lara closed her eyes for a moment. 

"The harbour," Lara told herself softly, nodding. The more she thought about it, the more certain she became. Even if there was no good reason for it, Lara had long since ceased to believe in simple coincidence. "Sam's gone to the harbour. She's going back to Yamatai."

###

The drive down the harbour seemed to take an eternity, and every traffic light and delay was time Lara could ill afford to waste. She'd managed to wipe off most of the blood from her face and sleeves during the cab ride, and when she'd finally arrived down at the busy harbour, she'd carefully maintained a low profile. No matter how much she wanted to call out for Sam and hope that she'd answer, Lara doubted that it would be that simple.

Feigning "ignorant foreigner", Lara had asked around all of the commercial cruise agencies. With so much cash at her disposal, the Sam that Lara had known for years would have preferred to travel in style and comfort. As Lara turned up more and more blank looks and shrugs when she'd tried to describe her friend, she began to doubt her reasoning. 

Lara paced back and forth on the docks, muttering to herself as she watched cargo ships and smaller fishing boats head on out into the night. Sam _wasn't_ acting like herself, and if she was heading for Yamatai as fast as possible... What if Sam hadn't gotten booked herself passage on one of the luxury boats, but plied the captain and crew of a cargo vessel with all of that money? 

Feeling ill as she watched more boats vanish into the night, Lara realised that any one of them could be headed to Yamatai, army sanctions be damned. With little else to go on other than the feeling in her gut, Lara was still certain that it was Yamatai that Sam was after, and that she needed to assume that Sam had already left. 

_Sam is gone, and in that state, I don't know what to think._

A part of Lara's mind - that same instinct that had told her "Yamatai" - told her her that she already knew what was happening, but she crushed that thought ruthlessly as she focused on the terrifying mess laid out before her. 

She should have taken care of her own before looking into other mysteries, no matter how well-intentioned she'd been. She'd never wanted to return to Yamatai again, and now because of that well-meaning neglect, she had to go back to the nightmare that had both scarred her and made her.

Lara kept pacing the dock, shaking her head and trying to brace herself against the horror welling up inside her at the very thought. 

She had to go back there though, because it was Sam on the line, and if Sam was finally taken by Yamatai too... After Grim, Roth and Alex, Lara knew that it would be the last straw. She'd break, because Sam, _Sam_ was...

Lara loved her, and she couldn't let this be the end.

###

Lara leaned over the ship's railings, her duffel bag slung over her shoulder as she raised her hand to shield her eyes against the sunlight reflecting off of the ocean. 

From where the ship was making anchor off the coast of Yamatai, Lara could see that the island was crawling with activity. With the island sectioned off by the Japanese army and the scientists they'd brought in for consultation, Lara had had to make a few hasty phonecalls to Sam's father. She'd been right in making that call between her arguments with booking agents and ship captains - Mr. Nishimura must have pulled a few strings, because when he'd called her back almost an hour later, he'd told her that the army's restrictions would not be an issue when they arrived.

It still took them far too long to reach the island, and as she'd paced the tiny length of her room and compulsively checked the horizon, Lara had been driven to distraction by what lay ahead. It was bad enough that the cold reality of Yamatai loomed ahead of her - the idea that Lara was already too late to save Sam was not one that she could stand, and she couldn't keep herself from dwelling on the thousand different ways she might have averted this mess in the first place.

The journey into the Dragon's Triangle eventually came to an end, thankfully without incident, and now it was just a matter of waiting for the Japanese military to escort her onshore. Lara wasn't sure what Mr. Nishimura had told them of why she was revisiting Yamatai, and to be honest, she didn't particularly care. So long as the soldiers didn't interfere with what she had to do...

Lara's grip on the strap of the duffel bag tightened reflexively as she watched a speedboat approach, and as it neared, she could make out the handful of Japanese soldiers aboard. There were fewer for the escort back to Yamatai's shore than she would have guessed - the way the island had been locked down while the Solarii were rounded up and the bodies counted, she'd expected a rigorous screening process. 

While Lara was fairly confident of her ability to slip away from the main base of the army's operations, the initial screening and confiscation of everything she carried in the bag was what worried her most. 

She needn't have been so concerned. When she was ushered onto the speedboat by the soldiers, they seemed... Distracted. That was how she would describe it. Lara caught enough of the rapid conversation between the commanding officer's men to note that there had to be some trouble of some kind back on shore - what it was, none of them really elaborated on. 

Lara was fine with this; their distraction was to her benefit, but she still kicked her bag further under the seat of the boat to be certain. 

The Japanese army and their scientists had set up a temporary base on the shipwreck beach, Lara noted as the speedboat approached the shore. The dock had been reconstructed near the beach shack Lara and the others had sheltered in during their last tense night on Yamatai, but she could not afford to dwell on the past at a time like this. She watched the soldiers jump out onto the dock as they killed the engine, and she pulled her bag back onto her shoulder. 

Lara accepted the offered helping hand from the one of the soldiers, and she exhaled long and low. 

_Here goes._

Lara allowed the soldiers to escort her to where the army had set up camp - probably for more processing to ensure she wasn't a part of the media or going to cause trouble. Her nerves had finally settled, and a calmness had descended on her.

Lara and her escort entered the makeshift base up in the dunes without delay, and the place was crawling with Japanese soldiers and people that had to be scientists from all sorts of disciplines. Lara automatically catalogued the direction of movement of the foot traffic, how the Japanese soldiers were armed and how _well_ , and the layout of the base. 

One of the doors off to the side of the narrow hallway stood ajar, and Lara could feel the refrigerated air spilling from inside. Inside were piles upon piles of body bags, and Lara already knew that they were full. How many thousands had lost their lives on Yamatai?

Shouting broke out up ahead of them, and Lara's eyes narrowed as the skin on the back of her neck prickled. She could hear the sound of scuffling and angry shouts, and her hand impulsively twitched toward her duffel bag. Chaos on Yamatai - she shouldn't have been surprised. 

"Praise be to the Sun Queen!" Lara heard a man shout, and she shook her head wearily. She supposed that the Solarii zealots were harder to round up than she'd thought - and she hadn't exactly pegged any of them for men who would surrender, either. 

_But that man is in uniform..._

Lara didn't have any more time to dwell on it as the soldiers around her tensed at the outburst up ahead.

"Another one?" One of the Japanese soldiers to Lara's left spat the words out, and the other held up a hand. Lara didn't miss the way the tension in the base had skyrocketed, or the way both of the guards had reached for their weapons. 

"Stand too close to the madness, and you get trapped in it," the other said, before looking to Lara. "Wait here." 

Lara nodded, but she wasn't about to promise anything - especially when the yelling down the narrow hallway grew more violent. When the first gunshots rang out, Lara was already moving, dashing through the confused, milling crowd and easily tracking her path back to the entrance. As she ran, Lara thought she heard the soldiers shouting for her to stop, but she ignored them and burst through the doors and into cold daylight. 

She didn't waste a moment reorienting herself, seizing her duffel bag in an iron grasp and sprinting up the dunes. She could hear footsteps behind her and harsh orders in Japanese, but she darted in through a crack in the side of the cliff face and kept going. Her four days on Yamatai, hiding from the Solarii and then the Oni, had apparently taught her far more of the island's secrets than what the soldiers had learned in their whole month and a half since. 

It was only when she had made it deep into the forest that Lara slowed to catch her breath. Reaching into her bag, Lara knelt on one knee and pulled out her array of weaponry - old friends that she'd never much wanted to meet again. Most of them had been disassembled for travel, but it only took her a short time to put them all back together - Roth's handgun, the bow slung over her back, the rifle and the shotgun all slid into place as if they'd never been gone at all.

Lara exhaled, looking down at Roth's gun. 

"Sam, where could you have gone?" Lara asked the forest all around her, before holstering the weapon and setting off in search of her missing best friend.

###

Lara began her search for Sam up in the summit forest, but even before she began, she knew she was looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack. She was trying to find one person on the whole of Yamatai - Sam could be holed up just about anywhere. It would take her a day just to cover all of the shanty town alone.

 _Where would Sam go?_ Lara asked herself as she crouched at the edge of a forested cliff overlooking the shanty town. From her vantage point over the ruins, she could see that it was crawling with Japanese soldiers and scientists, and there was a growing pile of body bags on the outskirts of the rudimentary fortifications.

Lara sighed - if they thought the body count was already too high, what they found at the monastery would be something else entirely.

The task of finding Sam seemed impossible, and Lara wasn't sure how much time she had to waste on a methodical search of the entire island. Lara tried to revise her thought process as she tracked the flight path of a helicopter against the overcast sky.

 _Maybe,_ Lara thought, slowly hardening herself to what seemed to be the inevitable, _The question that I need to be asking isn't where Sam would go, but where Himiko would go._

A small, isolated explosion went off from the shanty town below her as the soldiers set off another of the Solarii's many booby traps. The screams were thin and faint by the time they reached Lara's position on the cliff. How many of the Solarii were left? Would Himiko seek them out? How much control had the Sun Queen exerted over the Solarii? How much of Mathias' ravings about communing with her spirit simply had been a result of madness?

It felt like every time she turned her mind back to Yamatai, the pieces of the puzzle she'd slotted into place seemed skewed and ill-matched, and more questions appeared to nag at her.

 _What of the monastery, then?_ Lara asked herself, craning her neck to stare up the side of Yamatai's mountain-range. Most of the outer structures built in Yamatai's prime had been broken away under the onslaught of Himiko's fury, and Lara doubted that someone of Sam's physical prowess could scale the mountain without them.

Even if Sam could make it up there, the ruins were empty of supplies and the Oni had all died. If Himiko truly lived again, exactly what was left there for her?

Lara turned her attention back to the island, laid out before her. The Sun Queen's burned down palace was a blackened blot on the island's greenery, but... Lara nodded to herself, the motion feeling shaky as she slung her bow back over her shoulder and checked her stock of ammo.

She supposed the answer to Sam's whereabouts was obvious, once she considered it in the right light.

Lara wished with all of her heart that she was wrong, and she didn't want to ask herself what would happen if she was right after all.

###

By the time Lara had slipped through the shanty town under the noses of all the Japanese soldiers, before scaling the rocky mountain the palace had once been balanced on. The ancient palace, once used and fortified as the Solarii base of operation, had all but been destroyed by the inferno Lara had inadvertently caused.

Charred walls of stone and crumbling fittings were all that stood now, with the ornately carved wooden structures all turned to charcoal. Lara warily made her way through the ruins, ducking under the scorched beams of wood in her path as she searched.

That far up the mountain, all Lara could hear was the whistling wind and the sound of the crows as they circled above. The Solarii themselves were long gone, though Lara had very neared trodden on at least seven exposed, blackened skulls.

 _The cultists who had died in the fire, perhaps?_ Lara asked herself when she bent to examine the latest, grisly remainder. _Burning to death... What an awful way to die._

Back when she'd been fighting for survival, it had been hard to imagine any of the Solarii as people who had once had hopes and dreams. It had been easier to dismiss them as animals, as humans warped beyond all recognition. There had been a special brand of madness, and Lara again wondered how much of a role the Sun Queen's magic had in turning those men into monsters.

 _If Japanese soldiers are falling prey to it,_ Lara thought, wiping her soot-streaked fingers on her trousers and tugging her jacket closer about herself. _Then maybe there is something supernatural to the Solarii madness after all. And if it's still taking victims, what does that mean?_

Regardless of whatever was going on with the Japanese army, first she needed to find Sam. Lara continued to search through the wreckage, weaving around crumbling remains of old rooms and scrambling over what stone foundations had survived the blaze.

It was only when she had made it to edge of the mountain that she found Sam.

Sam was standing in the ash in the burned out shell of the old palace, her back to Lara as she looked out over the horizon as the sun set against the stormy sky. It felt like a reflection of their last encounter, that night in Sam's room. Lara approached her warily, moving silently through all the rubble and ruins. During their last confrontation, Lara had not been prepared. Now?

Lara swallowed and levelled her shotgun at Sam's back, even if her finger was shaking on the trigger and she was clenching her jaw so tightly that it ached. God, it was Sam that she was facing, and that did some awful things to Lara's conviction, but she had to focus. She couldn't let Yamatai take Sam without a fight.

"Sam. We can fix this, Sam," Lara said loudly, announcing her presence to Sam as she eased forward over the rubble. It felt like her whole body thrummed with a familiar sort of nervous, tight energy, and she'd zeroed in all of her attention on Sam.

Sam didn't respond to Lara's words, simply kneeling slowly - almost inhumanly graceful - to run her hands over a scorched, metal brazier. The back of Lara's mind, always cataloging and assessing, told her that the area they were standing in had to have been where the throne room had once looked out on all of Yamatai.

Lara felt like crying - this was _Sam_ and she would have never willingly gone back. She swallowed the feeling, trying to galvanise herself into action. What good would it do for her to cry now?

"Sam, please answer me." Her finger on the trigger felt slick with cold sweat, and she tensed as she raised her voice further. "Sam-"

 _"Sam_ is not here." It was Sam's voice, but it had a peculiar lilt to it as she finally turned to meet Lara's eyes directly. Lara's skin crawled and a sudden tremor ran through her. There was something hollow, alien and mad in those dark eyes, something that was not Sam at all.

_Oh god. Then it is true. How have things gone so wrong?_

"What -" Lara swallowed unsteadily, shaking her head desperately. She believed it, but she didn't want to. "What did you do to her?"

"It was not immediate." Sam - Himiko, Lara reminded herself with a bitter feeling in the pit of her stomach as she resettled her grip on the shotgun she'd kept levelled at Himiko - turned away from her again. She was like a monarch looking over her kingdom - or maybe more like a madwoman caught in the false memories of her own delusion.

"The process was slow. It was not hard to overwhelm a soul lost in a sea of despair." Himiko spoke with Sam's voice, even if she lacked all of Sam's upbeat enthusiasm. It was enough to do Lara's head in.

Lara suddenly missed Sam - _her_ Sam - with a fierceness that made her heart ache. She'd promised Sam that she'd look out for her, and so far she hadn't exactly done a stellar job of it.

"How?" Lara demanded, needing to know how the Sun Queen had stolen Sam from her. She'd thought that the magic had been broken and Himiko's soul laid to rest, but clearly that had been wrong.

'Sam' didn't answer, her attention still fixed on the setting sun. Lara could hear the rumble of thunder, and she could smell supernatural storms on the air. It ached in all of her scars.

"Tell me _how._ " Lara raised her voice again, feeling the wind subtly pick up around her. She remembered the way the Sun Queen had controlled the wind and lightning the first time on Yamatai, but she couldn't let herself become daunted now. "So help me god I will shoot you, whether you're using Sam's body or not. Your brand of immortality isn't going to survive a bullet to the face."

No matter her bravado, Lara wondered if she really could really go through with it. Unbidden, memories of Sam as she'd been before Yamatai flashed to mind. Sam had been with her for so long, and ever since their boarding school days, Lara had come to expect Sam smiling at her from behind the camera. What would she do if Sam was taken from her, after losing Roth, Grimm and Alex?

_Oh god, Sam..._

"The girl was weak - and I am strong. The transfer. It was not a..." Lara's gaze snapped up to Himiko's face just in time to watch her frown, as if searching her memory for something. "An on-off switch, this girl's memories liken it to. It was not all or nothing. The weak is consumed by the strong."

 _'This girl's memories'?_ Lara's grip on the shotgun tightened until the stock creaked, and her throat suddenly felt tight. Of course, it was obvious and logical that the Sun Queen would use Sam's memories to her own advantage. The thought of Himiko rifling through all of Sam's experiences for tools against Lara still made her feel physically ill.

"Then I didn't stop the ritual in time, and enough of your soul transferred over?" Lara asked. Himiko had taken Sam's life in its entirety, then. She'd been too late.

"Even but a few drops of ink into a vase of water can create change. Create... traction." Himiko turned back to her, dark eyes narrowed and calculating. "You are a strong warrior. In Yamatai, we value strength. With so many of my Oni gone, I would have you as my Stormguard. My protector."

Lara stared at her, unable to believe the _gall_ Himiko had in making such a request. It was adding insult to injury - the Sun Queen had taken Sam from her, and now she expected that Lara would simply lay down her weapons and allow herself be used as another attack dog? 

"You have got to be _kidding,"_ Lara growled out, and lightning cracked overhead. The air smelled even more strongly of rain, and she heard the first drops begin to spatter to the ashy ground.

"Do not mistake my mercy for generosity. Were it not for the vessel's feelings, lightning and storms would have already ended your life."

Lara's breath caught at that, and she shook head, trying to make sense of it for a moment.

_The vessel's feelings... drops of ink in the water... even the confirmation that the ritual was only **partly** successful..._

Was Himiko saying that she had not fully supplanted Sam? That meant - that meant that Sam was still in there somewhere, even if she was buried under the Sun Queen's will. That meant that not all hope was lost, and that maybe - _maybe_ \- Lara could pull out another miracle and bring Sam home again.

It was a risk she had to take.

Lara's nerves had settled again, and she met Himiko's eyes without flinching. "I have an offer of my own to make. Let her go," Lara bit out. "And go to hell!"

That response did not sit well with Himiko, and Lara wasn't surprised in the slightest. Himiko's face twisted into an expression that Lara had never seen Sam wear before, and the effect chilled Lara to her core.

Lara heard debris crunch underfoot as more thunder rumbled in the dark skies, and she turned with a jerk to find herself confronted with an Oni. Out of the corner of her eye, Lara could see another moving in the shadows of the wreckage as she retargeted the closest with her shotgun. Unwilling to take her attention off of the Sun Queen, Lara immediately whipped Roth's handgun from the holster at her side and leveled it at where Himiko stood at the cliff's edge.

_Damnit._

Himiko was a threat of an unknown capacity. Lara frankly had no idea of what the Sun Queen was capable of in close combat, and the Oni were nothing but bad news however she looked at it. She shook her head, gritting her teeth as she tried to keep one eye on Himiko, while still giving her pet monsters the sort of attention they required.

It wasn't the best situation to be in, but Lara had faced steeper odds than this before. That didn't mean that it was going to be pleasant - nor easy.

"End our visitor," the Sun Queen ordered the Oni in an ancient dialect of Japanese, and Lara could no longer afford to keep her eye on Himiko as the warriors in front of her drew their naginata.

 _Fine. Have it your way!_ Lara silently spat at the Sun Queen, eyeing off the Oni as they advanced on her. There were just the two of them, Lara noted as she backed away slowly, which was a small relief. Neither of them seemed to be heavily armed - certainly not like the hulk-like Oni she'd faced during the ritual - but the shields they each carried had always proven a problem.

The Oni nearest to her roared - a sound both inhuman and guttural - before lumbering forward. Lara jerked back, dodging a series of three wide swings before sidestepping the final forward thrust. The rain had set in fully, soaking her clothing and the ground. As she tried to pivot to unload her shotgun into the Oni's side, her boots slipped in the ashy mud and her wild shot ricocheted off of the wide shield strapped to its arm. Gasping, Lara righted herself just in time to roll under the other Oni's large swing. She moved on instinct as she came to her feet again, and lashed out with the stock of the shotgun and rammed it into the back of the Oni's head.

The creature roared as Lara's blow knocked the helmet clean off, leaving it stunned for a moment as she sidestepped the first Oni's heavy, overhead strike. Lara grabbed Roth's handgun from her side holster again, unloading a rapid three-shot burst at the Oni before darting away again.

As much as Lara knew she could use some extra distance between herself and the Oni, she also needed to keep an eye on Sam. Lara couldn't afford to lose Sam again. She felt a surge of relief as she noted that Himiko was still standing on the edge of the cliff, and watching the fight with a frozen, aloof expression and narrowed eyes -

Lara paid hard for that moment of inattention, and the first Oni lunged forward with a guttural shriek and rammed her hard with the broad shield in its hands. Lara's breath was knocked from her as she hit the ground badly, but by that point adrenaline had well and truly kicked in and she rolled to the side just in time to evade the downward thrust of the Oni's naginata. She bit back her groan of pain, gritting her teeth and unloading another five rounds from the handgun against that damnable shield.

Lara didn't have time for a long, drawn out fight. She had to end this thing, and quickly. Like an answer to her problem, the cliff's edge loomed out of the corner of her eye.

_Perfect._

Lara rolled to her feet, darting backward as the Oni lumbered after her. She stayed just in range of the Oni's naginata, ducking and dodging under the wide swings and sharp jabs and drawing it back patiently. The cliff loomed behind her, and Lara _felt_ the steep drop rather than saw it. She stopped moving, bracing herself and zeroing all of her attention on the monster before her. If she misstepped now...

The Oni roared from behind the leather demon's mask. Its weapon shot forward to either gut her or push her over the cliff, but Lara pivoted, darting in and under the naginata's blade. She didn't give the Oni a moment to re-orientate itself, and with a yell she slammed her boot into the small of the Oni's back.

The Oni teetered on the edge of the cliff for a few terrifying heartbeats, clawing wildly at the air - Lara ended it without hesitation, firing two shots into the Oni's chest plate. She had the satisfaction of hearing the body bounce a few times on the cliff face, before it finally hit the rocks below.

 _That wasn't so difficult,_ Lara thought to herself a little breathlessly, wiping the rain from her eyes with her mud-streaked hands as she turned to locate Sam and the other Oni -

Lara's eyes widened as she came face to face with the last Oni, already bringing its weapon down to gut her shoulder to hip in a massive overhead slash. She acted on instinct again, desperately throwing herself to the side. Despite the evasive action, the naginata blade drew a long gash down the length of her bicep, and she couldn't choke back the scream.

 _Shit._ Lara clutched at the cut, blood welling up between her fingers. It dripped down her arm, the warm fluid making her grip on her handgun feel slick. Her breath sounded ragged and harsh in her ears as she heard lightning crack overhead. The injury only hurt a little - it was probably thanks to the adrenaline.

The Oni lashed out at Lara again in rapid, broad strikes, but swallowing her pain, she rolled under the cuts and immediately sprinted for the refuge of a nearby, scorched wall. As she pressed herself against it, her heart hammering and biting down on her lower lip to keep her from focusing on the pain in her arm, Lara knew that the situation was less than ideal. She'd need to handle it though, because Sam was over there and needed Lara to come through for her again.

She just had to finish the fight quickly.

Lara waited behind the scorched wall, changing her handgun for her rifle and shaking her head to rid herself of the seeping feeling of numbness. She listened with everything she had, trying to filter out the thunder, wind and rain, waiting for that telltale creak of armour around the corner.

Lara lunged for the Oni as it sprang around the corner, desperate to end it now. She darted sharply under the Oni's weapon, drawing an arrow from her quiver with a sharp, practiced movement. She shoved the arrow clean through the back of the Oni's knee, taking a sick satisfaction in hearing the creature bellow in agony before pivoting - and unloading half the damn magazine through the Oni's chest and unarmoured head.

She didn't stop to watch the creature finally fall, already sprinting for where Himiko - and therefore Sam - was still standing at the cliff's edge. Lara could scarcely hear her own ragged breath over the din of the rain, wind and thunder, and the light was all but gone from Yamatai now.

Something powerful and alien _yanked_ Lara forward and into the air, and she instinctively knew that she had earned herself a first-hand look at just what sort of magic the Sun Queen had at her disposal. Of course the storms were only the very tip of the iceberg... She hung in the air like a fish on a hook, phantom fingers curled into a grip in the collar of her leather bomber jacket.

"You fight well, for an enemy of Yamatai." Himiko's voice was even and cold, and in spite of the roar of the wind in Lara's ears, she could hear every word that the Sun Queen spoke. She approached Lara slowly and deliberately, her hand extended and clenched into a grip, much like the one Lara imagined was holding her in the air. "This is where your battle ends. You cannot save this girl, no more than the others could be saved."

Lara clenched her teeth as she clutched futilely at the magic holding her up by her collar. If she slipped out of the jacket, could she get free? A fresh wave of pain started from the gash running down her bicep. Injured as she was, it would be painful, but...

"If you think I'm going to let you have her-"

Himiko laughed - a single, cold sound against the fury of the storm. "You have not a choice in the matter."

Her hand moved subtly, and the grip on Lara's jacket eased - and instead locked about her throat. Lightning flashed nearby, far too closely for Lara's peace of mind, and the phantom grip on her throat began to constrict slowly.

"Sam," Lara gasped out, reaching out desperately. Lara was weaponless and powerless against Himiko's magic, and Sam was the only one who could help her now. Sam, who was buried somewhere under Himiko's magic and soul. She met those dark, cold eyes, trying to push down the sense of revulsion at the mad fury reflected in them. "A... a little help here would be... really _appreciated_ right now-"

Lara's words were cut off as the pressure around her throat increased two-fold, and the world began to swim before her eyes. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't speak, and she was going to die at the hands of her best friend and only remaining family.

 _Yamatai is going to kill me after all,_ Lara thought sluggishly as unconsciousness began to drag her under one last time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lara figures out a way forward, and Sam tries to hold off Himiko's soul while her sense of self frays even further.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, a major thank you to [fmorgana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fmorgana) and [Accidental_Overlord](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidental_Overlord) for all their help with developing this chapter and then making sure it was up to scratch.

_It was like an itch at the back of Sam's mind that she couldn't scratch or ignore. It was like a murmured name in a crowd of people, or the niggling feeling that she'd forgotten something important. That wasn't quite it, though._

_No, Sam thought as she flicked through a photo album. It was more like she was ignoring something important. She'd been holed up in the quiet of the room in the Endurance for longer than she could remember - just looking over photos or videos of what seemed to be her fondest memories. Rain pounded against the porthole, and overhead, the fluorescent light flickered fitfully as the ship groaned._

_Every so often, though, the video on the camera would skip forward dramatically. They were just fragments of a nightmarish reality - things like the Solarii enforcer grinning down at her as he ripped the smuggled radio from her hands, or when James Whitman shoved her into Mathias' arms in one final act of betrayal. There were grisly photos slotted in amongst her childhood, but she'd always close her eyes. When she'd open them, the clip or the photos would be gone and she'd slowly relax once more._

_She did not want to remember Yamatai, Mathias or the Sun Queen, and she was sure that she'd come apart at the seams and never recover from it. She wasn't like Lara, and she couldn't keep moving forward when all she could see was violence and terror._

_The room groaned around her, and Sam wondered how much of the old palace was left outside._

_"Sam! A little help here would be... really appreciated right now!"_

_Sam's head shot up, and she stared at the heavy, steel ship door. That had - that had been Lara's voice, clear as day, and she had been begging for Sam's help. That wasn't right, because Lara didn't beg._

_Not like that._

_Sam closed her eyes, feeling the whole room quake around her as the storms raged. When she opened her eyes, the video camera that she'd put off to the side was on her bed again, and the camera's LED screen had been flipped open. Sam wet her lips, her heart pounding as she took in the display. The video was paused, and the frame showed Sam herself in the ruins of the old palace while Lara choked on the Sun Queen's magic._

_Sam's hands shook as she took a hold of the camera once more. She didn't want to play the video of Yamatai and beyond - she didn't want to experience any more terror and pain. Most of all, she didn't want to face what she - what Himiko - had already done to Lara back in Japan._

_But it was Lara out there, her life on the line as Sam allowed Himiko to use her body like a puppet. Lara, who had been there for Sam through everything, and who had been willing to put her life on the line just to stop Mathias the first time around._

_Facing reality was hard. Even so, Sam would never forgive herself if she let Himiko win and hurt the one person she'd come to count on._

_She closed her eyes and hit the 'play' button on the camera._

###

When Sam opened her eyes, gasping for breath, she was staring at a storm-darkened sky from where she lay in the cold mud. Night had almost fallen, and she could see sheet lightning flashing through the storm clouds roiling above. She felt incredibly drained, and a bit like she'd been run over by a bus.

Himiko had not exactly been gentle with Sam's body, especially with the whole 'summon the storms' magic she'd been abusing since she'd taken over back in Tokyo, and Sam could feel the drain of every spell on her own energy levels.

Sam blinked, full awareness of her surroundings rushing back as she heard someone scrambling through the mud toward her. Lara craned into view, her face streaked with mud and blood as she leaned over Sam's body. She moved quickly to cradle Sam's head in her lap, and her body was warm compared to the coldness of the ground.

"Oh god, Sam, I thought - I thought-" Lara cut off with an unsteady intake of breath. "Are you all right?"

Sam could feel Lara's breath on her cheek as she leaned over her, could feel the way Lara's hands shook slightly as she smoothed back the hair from Sam's forehead. In the final moments of light available, Sam could see the stark look of fear and relief war in Lara's eyes.

Sam _should_ have been feeling love and affection for her closest friend. Lara had been that one constant in Sam's life, and that one person who had brought out the best in her. That tender look in Lara's eyes should have made Sam's stomach perform backflips, but it wasn't. She was horrified to find that all she felt was anger and revulsion. Her mind hissed that Lara was the _enemy_ with such conviction that she could not help but believe that her best friend was going to press a gun to Sam's temple and pull the trigger.

As she looked up into Lara's face, Sam caught herself idly wondering what it would be like to have the Stormguard flay the skin from Lara's back -

Sam choked back a cry and shoved Lara away roughly, shuddering and gasping for breath as she crawled away a short distance on her hands and knees. That wasn't right, it couldn't be right. Sam never wanted to hurt Lara. No matter what she did, though, that sick sadism kept welling up inside her, poisoning her.

Lara didn't let her get far. She crouched at Sam's shoulder, and her grip on it was both calming and steadying. Sam still couldn't look at her without feeling so much hatred that _could not_ be her own.

_It's Himiko's hate,_ Sam thought desperately. _No matter how much I love Lara, Himiko is stronger than I am and she's infecting everything._

Sam was too weak to stop her - she'd been too weak to help herself the first time on Yamatai, and this time was no different.

She disgusted herself.

"Sam - Sam, please listen to me," Lara was saying by Sam's ear, her voice taut with both pain and conviction as her grip tightened slightly. "You're back, we can fix this -"

With one sharp movement, Sam knocked Lara's hand away from her shoulder. She shook her head desperately as she pushed herself to her feet, and she still felt so unsteady and drained of energy. That feeling of weakness was nothing compared to the tenuous grip she had on her sense of self. It felt like Himiko was waiting at the edge of her mind. It felt like the Sun Queen was watching for even half a moment of weakness that Sam was so _sure_ to give to her on a silver platter. When that happened - and she knew that it would - Himiko would surge forward and make her nothing but a puppet again.

"How?" Sam heard herself demand, her voice breaking as she hugged herself convulsively. If she didn't look at Lara, at least the hate was _manageable_. God, but it was _Lara._ Her role as a vessel for the Sun Queen had never seemed so cruel before. "I've got a dead _psychopath_ in my head and we've already destroyed the body! What more can we do, Lara?"

She heard Lara rise, slowly and painfully, to her feet.

"I - I don't know. But there has to be something, something I've missed or..." Lara trailed off, that certainty in her voice evaporating as she struggled to find the answer.

Sam knew, though, that there _was_ no answer. There was no way out.

"Or there really is nothing we can do." Sam's mood was black and wretched, and she stared down at her hands. Memories from when she'd been under Himiko's thrall had begun to slowly seep back the longer she was aware. The Sun Queen had murdered the crew of the ship that had brought her to Yamatai. After they'd put down anchor off the coast, Himiko had no longer had a use for them, and she'd eliminated them without mercy. It felt just like Sam herself had brought down the lightning that destroyed them. She swallowed, feeling ill. "Lara, what if - what if this is it?"

Lara didn't answer her immediately, and when she did, Sam knew that the lightness of her tone was feigned.

"We still need to try. I'm not letting the island take you without a fight, Sam." Lara put an arm around Sam's shoulder and hugged her close, apparently not to be deterred.

Sam thought, though, that Lara had fought hard enough for her freedom the first time around on Yamatai. Things had still fallen apart. It had just taken a bit longer than either of them had predicted.

Just what would it take to get rid of Himiko's spirit once and for all? How could you kill an immortal soul? Sam's thought grew darker as she allowed Lara to lead her away from the burned out ruins of the Sun Queen's palace.

###

Mindful of the Japanese soldiers now spread out all through the island thanks to the recovery activities and the fact that she'd been engaged in a very loud battle with the Oni, Lara realised that she had to put distance between Sam and the army. In another situation, maybe the Japanese soldiers could have been allies – but what Lara had seen back at the compound on the beach suggested rather strongly that they weren't exactly _welcoming_ to outsiders.

What were they so scared of? Was it the madness and obsession with the Sun Queen that she'd seen…?

In any case, Lara and Sam had taken great pains to avoid the brightly-lit satellite encampments that the soldiers had set up over the island, and they eventually decided on one of the tiny, run-down shacks in the mountain village. The storms had set in again, and it had ruined any plans Lara had had for a fire to ward off the cold. She'd had to settle with slotting her torch into the set of metal loops on the wall, and it gave her just enough light with which to bandage the long, deep gash running down her right bicep.

The deeply paranoid voice at the back of Lara's head told her that it was probably for the best – a fire could draw the attention of either the soldiers or the Oni. That was something she could ill afford, given how volatile Sam was.

From where Lara sat in the opposite corner of the shack, shivering and slowly drying off from the rain-soaked hike across Yamatai, she watched Sam out of the corner of her eye. Since Sam had come to her senses in the ruins of the Sun Queen's palace, she had scarcely looked up. That spark of energy and defiant playfulness that had essentially defined their friendship from the very beginning was completely absent, and it seriously worried Lara.

Lara hugged her knees up to her chest, wincing as she felt the growing bruises around her throat pull when she moved her head. She rubbed at them impulsively, her mind flickering back over the disastrous battle in the palace ruins. Just when she'd been certain that she'd screwed up for the last time, Sam had come through for her and fought back hard against Himiko's control. Lara had found herself freed and had dropped like a stone to the ground, and for a few moments she'd just drawn breath after grateful breath through her aching, painful throat.

Sam had won against the power of the Sun Queen - a being that had had the force of will and magic to dominate countless other women before her. Even if that victory did prove temporary, Lara couldn't help but feel that that had to account for something.

Sam didn't seem to think so highly of that victory though, and it seemed like all of the fire had fled her in the hours since. Quiet and withdrawn, she'd stubbornly resisted almost all of Lara's attempts at starting up a conversation to fill in the blanks.

Lara had almost been tempted to let her do as she pleased. Being back on Yamatai was enough to shove Lara back into a very dark place in her mind, and having all of her attempts at discussion thrown back in her face by her closest friend wasn't doing her fraying mental health any good.

_I can't make this about me. How easily is Sam holding Himiko back? How did she break the thrall at all?_ Lara asked herself, as the uncomfortable silence between them stretched on. Leaving Sam alone with "a psychopath in her head" did not strike her as being a particularly wise move.

Instead of letting Sam continue to stew in her own morbid thoughts, Lara began to talk. She filled the silence with talk of their time together at the boarding school when they'd first landed in hot water together. At Sam's continued sullen silence, Lara moved on to the years spent at UCL, letting herself take the time to reminisce over all the small, almost inconsequential details of a simpler time. She talked about their adventures backpacking through Europe, and after a while it didn't seem to matter so much that Sam wasn't really answering her - somewhere along the way, it had turned a little cathartic for Lara herself.

She desperately wished that things could go back to how they were though, back before Yamatai had changed them both so drastically. She wished that Sam would smile at her just once, the way she used to, and that one stray thought made everything hurt.

Lara continued to fill the silence doggedly, and after a while she ended up talking about what she knew of Reyes and Jonah. It was only when she started recounting the beginning of her trip since Yamatai that Sam finally looked up. Lara couldn't read the expression in Sam's eyes in the poor light cast by the torch on the wall, but the story abruptly died on her tongue regardless.

Sam looked down then, as if she only just realised then that she'd met Lara's gaze at all. For a few tense moments, Lara wondered how much control Himiko still had over Sam and if she'd need to contend with more magic so soon after nearly losing her life to it. The Sun Queen had been cold, confident and regal in a way Sam had never been. She shook her head. She shouldn't need to remind herself that it was Sam, and she shouldn't feel so apprehensive.

"I thought you'd never look up at me," Lara finally said, keeping her voice light as she shifted and resettled herself into a more comfortable position on the wall.

Sam didn't smile at the fond rebuke, and Lara could see a tenseness in the way she held herself - and the way she gripped the sleeves of her clothing, holding onto them as tightly as a drowning man held onto his life jacket.

Sam's voice was low when she spoke. "She wants to kill you, you know."

It was difficult not to let her dismay at the statement show, but Lara was certain she'd controlled it well.

Instead, she smiled, as if it really was no big deal that her best friend had announced that an evil spirit wanted her dead. "I'm fairly certain the Sun Queen wants to kill everyone."

Sam exhaled sharply, apparently not finding the humour in the admittedly poor joke.

"You're different, Lara. With you, it's personal." Sam was back to staring darkly at the dirty patch of floorboards in front of her.

Did Sam feel responsible for what Himiko had done while in control? That was not right. There had to be something that Lara could do to prove to Sam that she hadn't been responsible - and failing that, Sam needed to know that she _could_ take whatever it was that Himiko was throwing at her.

"It's a good thing you're holding her back for me, then."

"What if I can't?" Sam demanded, the words exploding out from her as if a dam inside her had burst. "What if she swallows me up again and I -"

Lara crossed the distance between them in an instant, grabbing both of Sam's hands in her own. Sam was still Sam. Partially possessed by a crazy Sun Queen or not, Lara loved her anyway. This stubborn worry, this _reticence,_ was not something that could have come from Himiko. The wallowing and the raw hurt was all the Samantha Nishimura that Lara had practically grown up with.

"You can do this, Sam," Lara told her, trying to convey as much certainty as she could in the words. Sam had to believe that she could do it - that she _needed_ to do it. "You'll hold her back, and we're going to fix everything. I promise."

It was so easy to make that promise again. Lara honestly had no idea of how she'd even go about 'fixing everything', only that Sam's lower lip was quivering and Lara impulsively reached out to brush Sam's cool, slightly damp cheek.

Sam looked over at her then, just quickly, and Lara tried to smile for her. The quivering finally stopped as the corner of Sam's mouth lifted reluctantly, and Lara counted that as a victory.

She withdrew her hand from Sam's cheek slowly, and she felt far too focused on the residual sensation of Sam's skin on her fingertips as she settled against the wall next to her best friend.

"Talk to me, Sam. Tell me everything. Right from the start."

###

Lara didn't sleep a wink that night. It certainly brought back her memories of her first round with Yamatai - of hiding in the dark, too choked with adrenaline and fear to even consider sleeping. Her tight grip on Roth's handgun made the bones in her hands ache, but she couldn't seem to convince herself to relax enough to let it go. This time though, it wasn't the Solarii, the wolves or the Oni that had her twitching at every sound that came from somewhere out in the stormy darkness. It was Sam. Lara took what comfort she could from listening to the sound of Sam's restless sleep over the other side of the shack - she focused on the noise of Sam's breathing and the creak of wood when Sam shifted.

She desperately hoped that it would be Sam who would wake up when the sun finally rose, and not Himiko. The idea of losing Sam again, of looking across the shack when Sam awoke and realising that a stranger was looking back – it was nothing short of terrifying. Worrying wouldn't do Lara any good though. There had to be a way to fix things, somehow.

_But what if I can't?_ the stubborn voice in the back of Lara's head asked her as she stared out the window at the sky. _What then? Sam is counting on me to come up with an answer, and I have no idea where I'm meant to begin._

There had to be something on Yamatai that could help her put a stop to this mess. There was an entire island to search, though, and Lara had experienced exactly how many hidden caves and caches the island concealed.

While the idea of spending weeks searching Yamatai didn't exactly fill Lara with joy, it was far from the worst case scenario. Maybe the information she needed did exist at some point, but who was to say that it hadn't been destroyed by fire or the elements?

The very first night Lara had been stranded on Yamatai, she'd seen the Solarii burn down a whole ancient city just to eliminate her, and that had been before she'd become a royal pain in the arse to kill.

How much else had been lost, all thanks to Mathias' insanity? Exactly what could she do if the means to saving Sam had been turned to ash long before the _Endurance_ had ever set sail?

_I shouldn't think about it. I need to focus on what I need to do now, because Sam is depending on me to come through with the right answer this time. Remember? I just need to keep moving._

The thought of Roth still made Lara's throat ache. It was times like these she could have used a bit more of his blunt wisdom - something to make her reconsider the situation from a fresh angle. He'd always had a bit of a knack for that.

He was gone, though, so Lara just had to make do with herself.

As the dark night sky over the mountain village began to grow pale with dawn's approach, Lara tried to lay out what she knew of the situation.

Soon after Sam had gone back to Tokyo, after everything had gone to hell on Yamatai, things had started to slip. Lara remembered the night that she'd woken up with Sam sleeping in the chair by her bedside - she'd been a little touched by it, though she'd thought that Sam's problems had been the same nightmares that plagued herself. After all, Sam had been through so much, even if she'd never had to take a life herself.

Lara let her head thump back against the wooden wall. According to Sam, the nightmares of the old palace had started soon after their return. She'd mentioned a number of things that felt almost symbolic to Lara - most notably the presence of a red thread and a corpse queen. The red thread seemed obvious enough, but the body...

That was an odd one, and Lara couldn't quite understand it.

The way Sam had phrased it - and she'd been quite graphic, Lara recalled with a turning stomach - it had sounded like the corpse on the throne had been bound with the thread in much the same way Sam had been.

Sam had interpreted it as the corpse being the puppeteer while she played the role of the marionette. Lara wondered if that actually was the case.

Outside, the rain had stopped, and it was well on the way to dawn. From where she now stood by the window, Lara could see up the steep side of one of Yamatai's mountains. She could see the tunnels and treacherous wooden framework built into the side of the mountain - they were all that remained of what had been the Sun Queen's monastery.

It had been in the monastery that Lara had first come to the conclusion that there had been something successive about the powers of the Sun Queen, and the first time she'd gotten the feeling that there was something supernatural about the rites on the walls.

So many women had become the slaves of the Sun Queen, their personalities and their individuality overwritten by a selfish, prideful woman clinging to both eternal life and endless power. Sam was just the latest victim of the ritual - just like that awful, decomposed creature Lara had burned atop the mountain.

Lara continued to look up at the monastery, slowly gripping the window sill in her hands.

_If rest of the Oni are in the monastery again, what exactly are they protecting up there? Last time, it was Himiko's last vessel._

Lara ran a frustrated hand through her hair, wishing that the pieces would slot together already. She needed answers - she needed a lead. She couldn't let Himiko have Sam.

_But Himiko's last vessel was not all that was up there, was it?_ Lara asked herself, her body going rigid as she thought back on everything she'd heard, read and experienced herself. _That first time that I was up in the monastery, I found the body of the first Sun Queen, buried deep within the Oni stronghold. What if..._

Destroying the Sun Queen's rotting vessel had not been enough to stop the transfer. Maybe the storms had only stopped because enough had been done to satisfy the Sun Queen, and that she'd been content to grow stronger inside Sam's mind until the point that she'd finally seized control.

_Why, though? Why hadn't it been enough? What more do I have to do to save Sam from her?_ Lara quickly quashed the feeling of angry hopelessness again. It wasn't going to do her any good to dwell on it.

Lara took a deep breath, laying out the hints in front of her and desperately hoping that she could make a picture with what she had.

_The first ritual chamber and the body of the first Sun Queen, the countless vessels, the dreams... That has to be the link. The red thread - the Sun Queen that I destroyed back then had just been the last of many puppets. What if..._

In the dusty floor of the hut, Lara sketched out a small diagram with her finger. It was a picture of a large circle, surrounded by countless smaller ones. She drew a line between each of them, weaving them together in a single line - a rite of succession. She'd originally believed that it had been a chain, with each of the Sun Priestesses being a link until that chain finally broke with Sam.

_What if it isn't a chain?_ Lara drew out another identical image in the dirt, one large circle surrounded by smaller ones. Instead of it being a chain of succession, each of the tiny circles was linked back to the central one - a representation of a puppeteer and her puppets. 

If this was the case, then it all traced back to the original Sun Queen. The original woman with the magic to make the rite of succession a reality. That made sense - Sam was certainly no sorceress, but Lara had seen her control the storms, summon the Oni, and had very nearly lost her life when the Sun Queen had turned it against her personally.

_What if the original Sun Queen is still involved somehow? What if I need to destroy Himiko's first body to eliminate whatever magic is still giving the soul the power to invade other minds and possess them?_

It was a long shot, and Lara could not help but feel that she was reaching with this solution. Maybe Sam was doomed, and maybe Lara couldn't save Sam no matter how much she loved her. It was still a lead. It was still worth a try.

###

Lara had shaken Sam awake not long after dawn, and it felt like she hadn't slept a wink all night. Her body still felt like an enormous mass of bone-deep pain, thanks to all of the magic Himiko had channelled through her, but Sam rose without protest and listlessly chewed at the energy bar Lara had tossed her way. Lara had looked on edge already, glancing out the open window of the wooden shack and down the winding mountain path.

Sam hadn't been in the mood to talk Lara out of whatever she was worried about - she still felt so bleak and a new morning hadn't changed anything. When Lara had murmured something vague about moving on, Sam had just nodded stiffly and followed her out into the morning light.

The sky was still cloudy and somewhat dark, but it was still nothing like the major storm Himiko had summoned during her confrontation with Lara. Sam still wasn't able to look at her properly without that burning feeling in her stomach threatening to make her physically ill. Since last night, the emotion had changed. Instead of it being pure hatred for everything Lara was, it had warped into a possessive sort of cruelty that Sam hadn't been prepared for at all. She wanted Lara now - but it had been entirely corrupted by whatever influence the Sun Queen had over her. Instead of just wanting to kill her, Sam wanted to maim and punish her as though it was her _right_.

Sam was more than a little scared of what that feeling meant - was it all the result of Himiko's rage, or had her own resentment towards Lara for leaving her after Yamatai been more toxic than she'd feared?

They set off in what was, for all Sam knew, a completely random direction, heading up into the steep mountains at the very centre of Yamatai. Lara set a quick pace as she lead the way, and Sam struggled to keep up with her as she deftly wove her way through the narrow gaps in the rocks and clambered over others.

If she had have been feeling more like herself, Sam might have made a joke or two about over-prepared Amazon best friends and levels of normal human endurance.

"I'm reluctant to stay in the same place for too long," Lara eventually said to Sam, looking back over her shoulder before she shimmied down the other side of the boulder she'd just climbed over. "With the army all over the island, and what I did to slip free of them, I don't want to risk anything. Then there are the Stormguard to consider."

While Lara had phrased it neutrally enough, Sam had to wonder exactly what it was that Lara had done to bypass the security camp set up on the beach. She knew what Himiko had done in order to get ashore without tipping off the army, but what had _Lara_ done? If she'd made such a mess of it, how exactly were they going to get off the island?

Shaking her head and accepting Lara's helping hand as she slid down the lichen-coated rock, Sam blew her hair out of her face and looked down at the mountain village they'd left so far behind already. Lara didn't pause though, already heading for a fissure in the steep rock face up ahead. Sam wasn't sure of Yamatai's layout, but she could have sworn that the army's base was in the other direction. Were they going to try to leave the island or not?

"Lara, where exactly are we going?" Sam finally asked, and at long last, Lara paused. Sam ignored the feeling of hot, possessive anger growing in her chest, and instead focused on Lara's expression - she looked conflicted, her eyebrows drawn together in worried frown as she looked back.

In the cold light of morning, Sam could see the wide ring of raised, red bruises around Lara's neck then. Her stomach felt like it had plummeted several hundred feet. She had Himiko's memories of seizing Lara when she'd ended the summoned Oni, of closing magic around Lara's throat. She felt Himiko's deep sense of satisfaction as Lara's struggling had slowed as if they were her own, and they were horrifying.

"I... I had an idea. A way to end this." Lara looked back up the mountain track, unmindful of the uncoiling horror in Sam's stomach. With what felt like physical effort, Sam turned her own gaze upward. From here, she could see the ruins of the ziggurat high on the mountain.

Sam wondered if Lara was hesitating because she was debating sharing her thoughts. Maybe Lara thought that Himiko was watching from behind Sam's eyes, listening to everything that was said and watching everything they did. Sam hated that she didn't know whether it was true or not.

Finally Lara spoke, and her words were soft. "We're going to the monastery, and I'm going to destroy the body of the original Sun Queen."

The response in Sam was both sudden and visceral - a yawning pit of horror opening up in her stomach as those embers of anger embedded in her chest fanned into full-on flames. For one terrifying moment, Sam thought that Himiko would rise up inside her and yank control away from her hands once more, but slowly it subsided - even if Sam's own trembling did not.

Sam's breath was shaking, and it felt like the cloudy top of the mountain was all she could see. All of her worst nightmares lay up there. She'd been taken captive by a madman, who had whispered words of poison about destiny and honour in her ear, and then there had been the rotting, screaming body of the Sun Queen. After everything she'd already been through, she'd expected that Lara would have been the last person to ever drag her back there.

Sam already felt unstable, and she definitely felt like screaming.

She somehow resisted that urge. In fact, she thought she sounded perfectly reasonable when she'd hugged her elbows and ground out, "I don't want to go _back_ there, Lara. Can't we just leave this place?"

Lara looked back to Sam, and her expression was one of implicit understanding that made Sam's stomach feel tight and cold. Yes, Lara knew what she was asking her to do.

With everything going on with Himiko, Sam sometimes forgot what Lara had been forced to do on Yamatai. That was wrong of her - friendship was meant to go both ways, and so far, all she'd done since Yamatai was resent Lara for no longer prioritizing their friendship and trying to move forward.

"Yamatai... that's where all this began. The Sun Queen, the storms, even our own part of the story." Lara exhaled, and she sounded so certain that she'd solved the riddle. Sam felt a pang of irrational, bitter jealousy at the thought that Lara only paid her attention when she was being possessed by the Sun Queen - she had to wonder if that was all Lara was _interested_ in. "I have a feeling that the means of ending it is here, too."

"I suppose it has a certain narrative appeal to it," Sam said reluctantly, and she tried to smile. Irrational jealousy or not, at least she knew that Lara had some sort of plan, and that she wasn't giving up hope - not the way Sam had.

"You won't be going alone. I'll be there with you the whole way, and if there is even a hint that it's too much for you, we'll get you out of there immediately. It's a promise, Sam." Lara almost looked like she wanted to reach out and give Sam a reassuring hug, but after a few moments, she looked away.

Both relieved and stung by that awkward distance between them, Sam shook her head. She wasn't convinced of Lara's plan, no matter how nice it felt that she was trying for Sam anyway.

"Say that the body is up there after all, and that it's going to work the way you think it will. What then?" Sam asked. She knew her frustration was seeping into her voice, and her words sounded harsh to her own ears. "What exactly are we going to do to something that is already dead?"

Lara gestured to the torch hanging from her belt, a small smile curving her lips. "Burn it, just like last time. There has always been a sort of purifying superstition to fire - maybe it's true after all."

"Why are you so certain that it'll work?" Sam knew that she sounded so angry and defeated in the face of Lara's optimism, but she was finding it hard to care when all she could feel now was creeping, cold despair and the full force of Himiko's hate every time she looked in Lara's way.

Lara's smile faded. "Why are you so cynical?"

Himiko stirred inside Sam's mind as she lifted her eyes to meet Lara's gaze, and Sam wished with everything that she had that she felt anything at all other than that possessive anger and hatred. She wished things were back the way they were before Yamatai, when the worst thing she had to fear was the fact that her reserved and bookish friend wouldn't have liked Sam contemplating hitting that.

"I'm not kidding around when I say that she's in there." Sam felt oddly breathless again, her heart beginning to race in her chest. "I'm _not_ myself, and she's tainting everything I feel. I can't... Lara, I'm _scared_."

With a sudden burst of movement, Lara reached out and impulsively wrapped her arms around Sam. Her hold was warm around Sam's numb body, and Sam... Sam squeezed her back just once, not trusting Himiko not to try to break Lara's neck, and definitely not trusting her own ability to stop it from happening. Her throat had grown tight by the time she'd moved to push Lara away, and she was certain she only partially succeeded at blinking the tears away.

"I promise, Sam, that we'll fix this. Then we can go home, once and for all." Lara paused for a moment, looking down at her weapons. Sam watched her check the ammunition in the shotgun, before handing it over. Sam's stomach plummeted. "The army is really the least of our worries when Himiko's return has revived god only knows how many of the Stormguard."

Sam looked down at it, like she would if Lara had just handed her an angry snake. Lara was giving _her_ a weapon. Sam's mouth had gone impossibly dry, and with a growing sense of horror, she watched Lara turn her attention back to working her way along the narrow mountain path.

Lara had given _Sam_ a weapon. There was a murderous spirit in Sam's head that had it in for Lara, a spirit that Sam was holding back by the skin of her teeth alone.

It was _not_ the time to be testing this sort of thing.

Sam watched Lara move up the rocky mountain terrain, watched the muscles work under her cargo-pants and where the battered, somewhat filthy jacket had hiked up to reveal the small of her back.

Himiko wanted Sam to pull the trigger and unload shell after shell into Lara's unguarded back. Sam's hands felt slick with sweat as she gripped the weapon tightly, and it felt like she was holding herself together by a cotton thread alone.

_Maybe... Maybe Lara is right. If Himiko's sudden anger at the suggestion of destroying the body is worth anything at all, then maybe we're on the right track._

It was that realisation and Lara's stubborn, foolish trust in Sam's ability to keep it together that made her think that maybe there was a way out of this disaster after all.

She had to keep a lid on Himiko's influence though - she couldn't let Lara down.

###

The air around them grew a lot colder the higher up into the mountain they climbed, and Sam was glad that Himiko had seen fit to dress properly for Yamatai's cooler climate. She still found that she was shivering in the powerful winds, even if she tried to ignore the way it seemed to cut through her as they slowly made their way up the mountain trail.

In spite of all the help Lara gave to Sam, it still seemed like she was constantly on-guard. She kept a watchful eye on the winding path up ahead, as if fully expecting the last of the Stormguard to spring out from behind the next outcropping of rock and slaughter them.

Even with all her wariness and the difficult path, Lara still talked about her experiences in fighting the Oni as they travelled. It was a steady stream of slightly-breathless but enthusiastic conversation as she talked about weak places on the armour, the combinations of weaponry they used, and some of the weirder rumours she'd picked up from the Solarii during her last stint on the island.

While Himiko still surged at odd moments, testing both control and weakness, Sam kept her head down and just focused on the whole not-falling-off-the-edge-of-the-mountain-and-dying thing. Weirdly enough, the constant sound of Lara's voice really helped her keep her grip on her sanity.

No matter how well-meaning and certain she was, none of it changed the fact that it was Lara who was forcing Sam to go back to the monastery. Given how many nightmares the place had given her since, she couldn't help but feel a little betrayed by that.

Lara's stream of conversation became a part of the journey up the mountain, same as the howling wind and the knuckles Sam had managed to scrape raw when she'd slipped and almost plunged off the edge of the precipice. It was only when they finally made it over the top of a sharp and jagged cliff that Lara's voice tapered off. From Sam's terrible guestimates, they'd only managed to climb half of the mountain, and she was already about to collapse into an exhausted, nervous heap. How had Lara managed to climb all the way to the top in a storm?

There was a steep granite rock wall in front of them, and it seemed like the path up the mountain ended there. Whatever it was that Lara had been heading for since the beginning, it seemed like they'd reached it. Sam didn't really see any way –

That was when they heard the roar from somewhere within the mountain. The sound echoed, making it seem like there could be dozens of the Stormguard in there. Sam shuddered, the hair on the back of her neck raising as she hugged her elbows.

In front of Sam's eyes, Lara went from wary to hardened killer in what really seemed like an instant, her whole bearing shifting up a gear as she moved forward. Sam could feel Himiko recoil within her head, because _that_ was the Lara that she was so scared of. Infected by Himiko as she was, Sam couldn't help but feel the same sort of terror. Once again Sam had the overpowering fear that Lara would turn, put the gun to Sam's head and pull the trigger.

It must have showed on her face, because Lara's bearing softened – if stone could be said to soften, really – and she tried to give Sam a weak-looking smile. 

"Guess we know where the Oni are, then," Lara said, and it was the gentle, almost wry sort of way she spoke that made the knot that had formed in Sam's chest ease a little. The hardened killer was who Himiko feared - but this was the Lara that Sam had grown to love. Lara took her handgun from where it was strapped to her thigh, and gave it a quick check-over. "Once we get inside, we're going to need to be ready for anything."

Sam looked back to the rock face. She really did _not_ want to do this. Was it too late to just turn back and get a boat off of the island? If the myths around Yamatai had turned out to be so painfully real, couldn’t there be another way somewhere else in the world? She swallowed, and then Lara reached out and grabbed her hand.

Lara's hand was cold, and as Sam looked down at it, her heart in her throat, she could see all of the tiny scratches and bruises over the backs of them. She wet her lips, and then she nodded reluctantly.

She had to trust Lara, as painful as it was. No matter what Himiko was making her feel, Sam couldn't let her win without a fight.

Lara looked satisfied with that muted response – which was good, because Sam was not giving her anything else – and began to tow Sam toward the rock face. As they neared, Sam was finally able to pick out a narrow fissure that had been cut into it – how had Lara managed to spot it at all?

Without waiting for Sam to hesitate and reconsider, Lara slipped into the mountain passageways and pulled Sam in after her.

The sudden and drastic change of environment made Sam's heart begin to pound. She could still hear the howl of the wind outside, but it definitely played second fiddle to the oppressive, terrifying darkness and the way the war cries of the Oni echoed off the narrow tunnel. A choking feeling of claustrophobic horror seized Sam, and she very nearly turned and ran.

She could still feel Lara's fingers laced with her own, somewhere in the darkness between them. Her grip on Lara's hand must have been almost painful, but Lara didn't seem to be bothered by it. After a few moments, after had Sam succeeded in getting her breathing and, you know, sheer blinding terror under control, Lara gave Sam's hand a gentle, reassuring squeeze and let go.

Sam tried not to freak at the sudden absence, and her relief was almost crushing when Lara lit the torch again. The dank, dripping passageway was bathed in the rosy light, and the look in Lara's eyes could have caused Sam physical pain.

She wanted to reach out and wrap her arms around Lara's neck and shoulders and just hold her for a bit, in spite of all of Himiko's hate bearing down on her. What if they both died in here? What if this was the last chance they ever got?

Sam swallowed, and she knew that she didn't have the courage to close that distance.

Lara smiled across at Sam again, presenting the torch for Sam to hold onto while they walked. Even though Lara had a gun in her other hand and there was danger all around them, she didn't let Sam's hand go as they began to move onwards through the mountain.

###

They travelled in the narrow darkness for what really felt like forever, and after a while Sam had relaxed into a sort of uneasy wariness. Himiko still loomed at the edge of her mind, whispering poisonously of torture, possession and control. The constant voice and potent feeling frayed Sam's sense of self further. Lara's hold on her hand seemed to help, much like that seamless flow of conversation while they'd scaled the mountain. It helped ground Sam in reality, she'd slowly begun to realise, and gave her a thread to her life that she was able to follow back if Himiko's shadow started grow too strong within her mind.

Lara was like some sort of lighthouse, and Sam wondered if she was even aware of how much good she was doing by just being there.

Eventually though, stumbling along behind Lara through treacherous and often steep pathways came to an end. Lara slowed, and beyond her, Sam could see where the tunnel opened up into a wide, torchlit cavern. Sam wet her lips, her mouth and throat suddenly dry.

Lara looked back at Sam almost apologetically, before letting her grasp on Sam's hand finally slip away. She instead turned her attention to the handgun that had been clenched in her other hand all that time, before accepting the torch back from Sam and extinguishing it with an expert flick of her wrist.

Slinking forward, low to the ground and wary, Lara moved toward the torchlight like a predator stalking prey. Sam followed suit, and she joined Lara at the lip of the dark passageway. Lara looked over her shoulder for a moment, pressing a finger against her lips to warn Sam to be quiet - as if she really needed to - before sinking further back into the shadows by the exit.

Sam watched Lara's face carefully as she craned her neck, observing everything that was going on outside in the torchlight. She noted all the tiny shifts of expression, and they told her almost as much about what was going on out there as words themselves. Once upon a time, Sam would have been pumped to know that she could read Lara so well. Now? She was just worried that the Sun Queen would be able to use that knowledge as a way to hurt Lara more.

After a few moments, Sam watched Lara's eyes narrow thoughtfully, and she glanced back over her shoulder.

"Check that out," Lara murmured, just loud enough to reach Sam's ears. She haltingly pressed herself in behind Lara, leaning over her shoulder as she looked. Lara's body felt rigid against her own, but almost all of Sam's attention was focused on the pair of Oni moving about the chamber outside.

Their movements were quick and Sam would have almost said that they looked panicked - but they were _Oni_.

"They look like they're searching for something," Lara observed after letting Sam look for a moment. Sam glanced back to Lara - and then swallowed. She had _not_ realised how close together their faces had gotten, and suddenly she couldn't breathe.

Sam really did not need her hormones coupled with Himiko's possessive hatred. The combination made her feel even more ill as some very interesting images crowded into her mind.

"What do you think they're looking for?" Sam asked, needing something to distract herself with, and she couldn't make out Lara's expression in the shadows.

"I'm not sure..." Lara said, taking a deep breath. "But I've got a really bad feeling about this."

###

They waited, tense in the shadows. Eventually, the Oni finished searching the area for whatever it was that they'd lost and moved on. Lara slunk out from their refuge in the darkness first, scoping out the area with her handgun for a few long moments. Eventually, Sam saw Lara's shoulders relax, before nodding over to her.

"I think it's all clear," Lara said, and Sam moved from the darkness and into the torchlit cavern. It felt good to be in open air instead of cramped, dark corridors, and Sam let her gaze slide over the dusty, ornate room. She didn't recognise this area from her captivity after Whitman died, which was probably a good thing. The shotgun felt heavy in her hands - Sam still didn't trust herself to use it, even if the urge to point it in Lara's direction had thankfully eased.

But Oni were definitely around - the chances were sickeningly high that Sam was going to need to use the weapon against them at some point.

They began to move through the torch-light interiors that had to have been full-on carved into the mountain, and their progress was nothing short of painstaking. It seemed like it was almost every ten minutes that Lara would tense at some distant sound, drag Sam into whatever shadows were at hand, and they would wait until the Stormguard troop had passed through.

It definitely happened often enough, but it seemed like Himiko hadn't revived nearly as many of them as Lara and Sam had been afraid of. On top of that, being on the lookout for potential enemies seemed to be pretty low on their list of priorities...

As they both straightened from their latest refuge spot behind a duo of Sun Queen statues, Sam wondered if the Oni would listen to her own commands. She had Himiko's soul inside her - were they able to tell which soul was in control? It wasn't something that Sam was all that eager to test.

_What, exactly, are the Stormguard looking for?_ The question repeated in Sam's mind, over and over, and it wasn't like they could just ask. The situation was getting increasingly weird - and Lara herself was looking more and more worried the further they travelled.

In the next room that they entered - Sam's uneducated guess had dubbed it a 'treasure room', and Lara had absently corrected it as 'sleeping quarters' - Lara paused. Her eyes searched the room, as if looking for something.

"There should be more here - relics, _bodies_ -" Lara muttered softly, cutting herself off and shaking her head. Her eyebrows had drawn sharply together in a frown, and she trailed one hand over the dusty surface of some old shelving.

"Isn't that good?" Sam asked, tilting her head and not really understanding Lara's issue with that. She had more than enough to deal with, what with Himiko poisoning her every thought, to be disappointed that she didn't get to wander through a horror maze of mangled bodies.

Lara didn't look like she agreed with that, pressing her lips together in a tight, stubborn line.

Sam sighed. She didn't want to argue with Lara - she wasn't sure she'd be able to cope with a fight. Not here. The sooner that they did what they had travelled all that way for, the sooner Sam would know what her future was.

She had to admit, maybe she was feeling a little hopeful that Lara would turn out to be right after all. Maybe things would be okay.

"Let's just keep going." Sam kept her voice carefully upbeat, even if she knew that Lara would be able to see through the false lightness immediately. "We're here, we might as well see it through to the end."

They eventually made it out into the open sunlight. The cliff was windblown and lacked most semblance of shelter, and there seemed to be score-marks in the rock face from where crumbling, makeshit defenses had been constructed and pulled down. Lara's pace picked up immediately, and Sam knew that look of intense focus. Lara remembered this path.

"This... this isn't right." There was a tight urgency to Lara's voice as she strode forward and rapidly scanned the area. "I've been here before. There were bodies all along here - soldiers from World War Two. Right _here_."

Sam didn't really know what Lara wanted her to say, and wondered if it was better to just stay quiet. Lara saved her the trouble.

"Something is really wrong, Sam." Lara kept moving, breaking into a run as she headed for something up ahead. Her panic returning full-force at the idea of being left behind in the monastery, Sam sprinted after her. She watched as Lara scaled one of the walls at the end of the path - seriously, how could she just _do_ that? - and slipped through some narrow gap and into the darkness that Sam could see beyond.

Sam listened to Lara drop to the ground on the other side, and she hastily looked over her shoulder to make sure the coast was clear as Lara scoped out the interior of whatever it was she'd rediscovered.

Her heart sank a little as she heard Lara bite of an expletive that she had to have learned from Grimm or Roth.

"Sam, you'd better get in here."

That... that did _not_ sound promising. Without further delay, Sam hoisted herself up on the narrow ledge and after a few moments of twisting, slid her way through the same gap Lara had used before her. Sam landed badly on the other side, and she was fairly certain that she now had a skinned knee to add to her current list of injuries.

Taking a moment to dust off her hands and jeans, Sam glanced about the dimly-lit room. On one side, massive doors hung open, their hinges busted and mangled, and a large, stone box stood in the center of the room. Sam shivered, hugging her elbows impulsively as she looked around at the paintings lining the each part of the chamber. As soon as Sam made out the picture of the burning woman, she knew exactly what she was seeing.

Sam swallowed, feeling like she was going to throw up. Trying to distract herself from what essentially was an artist's rendering of the nightmare her life had become, she looked back to where Lara was pacing back and forth in front of the coffin or whatever it was.

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but Sam knew that expression and that anxious pacing - Lara was freaking out. That was never good news.

"This - this was it," Lara said. She gestured to the coffin, almost desperately. "The body of the original Sun Queen was here."

"'Was'," Sam repeated, a sudden numbness seeping to her extremities and travelling inwards fast. "You mean..."

_Oh my god._

"It's gone. Sam, it's _gone_. That's what the Stormguard are looking for. They've lost the body somehow. And so have we." Lara began to pace back and forth again, slapping her forehead repeatedly with the heel of her palm as if that would somehow help. She looked wide-eyed and scared, as if her whole world was crashing down before her eyes.

Sam thought she could identify with that feeling, just a little. She looked back at the coffin, where her last chance at freedom had been kept for thousands of years. It didn't matter _who_ had taken it. With Himiko in her head, strong enough to take control again, Sam's chances were all spent and it was over.

She and Lara had tried, sure. But it was all for nothing.

All she felt was cold despair - and white hot rage that someone would _dare_.

The world's sound seemed to drain away as she stared at that empty, dusty coffin, and already Sam understood what was happening. She was far too weak to stop it. Himiko rose up like a storm once more, and this time the Sun Queen buried her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Himiko has taken control once more, and has buried Sam under her power. Lara has to figure out a way to reach the body of the first Sun Queen before Himiko and the Oni do, but it never is that simple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks to both [fmorgana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fmorgana) and [Accidental_Overlord](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidental_Overlord) for all their help in getting this chapter up to scratch. I wouldn't know what to do without you guys. <3

Lara's mind raced as she circled the darkened room, holding her torch high so she could better make out the fine details of the ancient paintings on the walls.

_The fire ritual - the urn symbolising the transfer of souls -_ Lara thought, scrambling to find some sort of lead, some way out of the mess that she'd dragged Sam into yet again.

Lara's heart began to race, her breath growing shallow as she struggled to find answers that probably weren't there at all. There had to be a way to reverse the process - perhaps a way to detach the soul of Himiko. Otherwise, how else could she transfer from vessel to vessel? If they couldn't use the body of the original Sun Queen, then maybe there was another way to do it -

White light exploded before her eyes, momentarily blinding her as the back of her skull erupted in agony. She stumbled forward, the word spinning dangerously as she failed to catch herself on the nearby tomb wall, and she crashed to the ground - hard. With shaking hands, Lara clutched at her head and felt hot blood sticking to her fingertips. Still struggling to see straight, Lara looked over to where Sam was standing.

There was an odd sort of smile on Sam's lips that seemed both cold and distant, and she held the shotgun like a club in her hands. Lara closed her eyes for a moment, her breath coming hard as she put the pieces together immediately. Going all the way up into the monastery against Sam's wishes had falsely built up her hope for a cure.

It had wrecked Sam's already fragile grip on her sense of self. Himiko had assumed control - and it meant that Lara had let her best friend down one more time. 

"Damnit, _Sam_ , you're stronger than this!" Lara could hear her breath almost sobbing as she slowly and painfully pushed herself to her feet. She tried to ignore the way her head still spun from the force of the blow, and she fumbled at her holster. Levelling Roth's handgun at Sam, she swallowed hard.

She tried not to see the person standing before her as _Sam_ , she really did. She needed to do what she had to. Otherwise, she'd be sentencing Sam to a life as an empty vessel.

Roth, Alex and Grimm flashed before her eyes - people that she'd loved, and people that she'd failed. Lara felt hot tears start at the corners of her eyes. She could see her hands shaking almost violently as she stubbornly trained the gun on Himiko.

She had to do it, but in the end she _couldn't_ , she realised in despair.

_Sam. How the hell am I meant to keep going?_

The moment of hesitation cost Lara dearly. Half a breath later, the sound of armoured feet on the stone floors of the monastery rang out behind her. Lara swallowed, her eyes darting as she tried to count them all - god, there had to be a _dozen_ of them, all running for her with their weapons drawn.

There were far, far too many of them now and there something fragile inside herself seemed to have been broken with Sam's final loss.

Lara swore, and even though Himiko was still a threat, she turned her handgun on the Oni as they neared. She fired a rapid burst of three shots at the nearest of the Oni, and she felt a small amount of satisfaction as the first shot knocked the one's helmet free, before the other two embedded themselves in what remained of the undead soldier's face.

The way her vision still lurched meant that most of her other shots flew wide, and they skittered harmlessly off of armour and shields as the Oni advanced. As the first came within striking range of its katana, Lara dodged back to avoid the long, horizontal cut. She retaliated hard, lashing out with her axe and sinking the blade deep into the side of its neck. She tried to rip it free from the desiccated flesh with a jerk, but it caught behind the collarbone.

She shot a look over her shoulder, to where Sam was standing.

_Sam. Can she even come back a second time?_

Lara cried out as she was caught in the side by another Oni's shield, pain reverberating through her barely-healed ribs as she stumbled. She shook her head to clear it, but the Oni she'd attacked with the axe growled and snapped a powerful kick into Lara's jaw.

She stumbled back, lashing out wildly with her fists and trying to refocus enough to take aim at the weak spots in their armour with her handgun. The flat of an Oni's blade knocked the weapon spinning, while another Oni slammed a kick into the back of her knee. Lara went down hard, and after that the battle was only a blur of pain and heavy blows as she curled into a tight, defensive ball and the Oni beat her into submission.

Everything hurt, and for a moment she swore she blacked out. That relief was momentary at best.

As two of the Oni seized both of her arms in powerful and unforgiving grips, Lara couldn't help but scream as her body convulsed in agony. Her nose felt bloodied and swollen, her eyes watered from the pain and her breath hissed through her teeth as she tried to refocus. The Oni dragged her onto her knees, holding her arms up behind her while a third wrenched Lara's head back, exposing her throat and face to the Sun Queen.

Lara immediately realised what they were doing - they were making her kneel.

Himiko had moved forward as the battle had drawn to a bloody and violent close, and her face was smooth and free of Sam's haggard, strained worry. She was still wearing an odd sort of smile, too - the insane kind of smile that made Lara's skin crawl.

She spat blood, her breath still shuddering as the pain slowly became a little more manageable.

"Sam, I'm so sorry."

Even if Sam wasn't there to hear her, Lara felt like she needed to apologise. She'd promised Sam that she'd had the answer, but there had been no body, Himiko had taken control again, and Lara was out of ideas.

Lara felt cold, empty and defeated. Sam was gone. What point was there in continuing to fight?

"You lost the body of the first." Himiko didn't address Lara, but the Oni that were holding her down. Himiko's expression had changed subtly, moving from one of calmness and control to one of cold anger.

"My final resting place was desecrated long before I returned to Yamatai, born anew." Himiko's eyes flickered down to Lara then - it was clear who she felt was personally responsible for said desecration. Good. "Because I left the island, you could not protect me. You _did_ not protect me. You failed to stop the enemy. The heathens went unopposed and stole my heart from its pedestal."

Lara closed her eyes for just a moment, and she shook her head slightly.

_So even Himiko doesn't know where the body is?_

The sudden movement must have drawn Himiko's attention, because suddenly the full weight of the Sun Queen's gaze was on Lara alone.

"Outsider. You have knowledge of these enemies. You know where they have taken my heart." The words were chilly and impatient - Lara doubted Himiko had ever needed to lower herself to conducting her own interrogations before this day.

"Not a chance," Lara bit out, her voice tight as she clenched her teeth. If she'd known where the body was, she would have gone _there_ instead of dragging Sam all the way here, especially when she'd been so scared.

Sam was gone, though, washed away under Himiko's fury, and Lara hadn't been able to help.

Himiko nodded to the guard gripping Lara's head by her hair, and the Oni's fingers tightened almost unbearably. The blade suddenly pressed against Lara's throat didn't really come as a surprise, nor did the pain. It was a sharp, white-hot line drawn against her throat even if the rest of her body throbbed with dull agony.

She felt blood trickle down from the cut, but she didn't flinch.

_What, exactly, is there left to fight for?_ Lara asked herself. There was no way she was going to get out of this one alive, but she'd be damned if she let Himiko have what she wanted. Roth would have called it spitting in her enemy's eye one last time - maybe that would be the only justice she could manage for Sam.

Himiko bent forward slightly, and Lara shivered as she placed her hands on either side of her face. The Sun Queen's hands were freezing on her skin as she forced Lara to look up into her cold, dark eyes.

"I offer you again - eternal life at my side, and a place in my Stormguard," Himiko murmured in the quiet of the tomb, and Lara tried to jerk back and away.

"I thought I'd made it clear what I thought of your offer," Lara growled. She was quietly surprised at how steady her voice was when faced with certain death at the hands of a madwoman wearing Sam's body.

Himiko smiled at her, though it had none of Sam's warmth.

"Normally the wishes of a vessel would be wiped clean, leaving a blank slate alone, but with the ritual incomplete... a minor sense of autonomy remains."

Lara's breath caught, and she searched Himiko's face for some trace of guile.

_Sam. Oh Sam. You're still in there after all._ Lara felt an enormous sense of relief crash down inside her, and the knowledge that Himiko hadn't completely subsumed Sam yet was a rallying point that she could not ignore.

She'd certainly gambled more on a lot less.

There was a blade still pressed to Lara's throat, though, and as the Oni shifted the edge and allowed it to bite deeper, she realised exactly what sort of position she and Sam were in. Himiko was going to let the Oni slit Lara's throat if she didn't cooperate - and she'd essentially be forcing Sam to watch.

Would that be the final straw that broke Sam? Was that what Himiko wanted, after all?

"The heathens on the beach have raided this sacred place, taking all things held holy and removing my heart. Where would they have taken it?"

Lara clenched her teeth as the blade pressed even closer, and she stared off to the side as she tried to _think_. They had a main encampment down on the beach, Lara knew, and she'd seen enough evidence to know that there were a number of smaller, satellite camps at some of the worst locations. She remembered that there had been all of those body bags, locked up in a cool room, and there had been madmen who seemed to have been driven insane by... something.

Was it the result of the close proximity to the Sun Queen's first body?

They would have recovered Himiko's remains after they'd finished canvassing the monastery. After that, anything of importance would have been stored somewhere secure - but at the main compound, or at one of the other camps? Was it even on the island anymore?

Lara shuddered as Himiko's frozen hand pushed back the hair from her face, and she was forced to look into unfamiliar, dark eyes.

"That was not so difficult," Himiko told her evenly, releasing Lara's chin with a jerk before looking to the Oni that held the knife at Lara's throat. "Invaders have come to our shores, and they have stolen what is most precious. Your orders stand. March on them, and show them the might of Yamatai and the Stormguard. Ruin them."

Lara's eyes widened, and she understood exactly what Himiko had just ordered. Those were innocent people - soldiers and researchers alike - and she'd just given the orders to execute the lot of them. Lara couldn't do anything to help them but feel complicit in their deaths. How had Himiko known?

Lara stared after the Sun Queen as she walked away, her Stormguard falling into step behind her.

"Sam. _Sam!_ " Lara burst out, gritting her teeth and pulling at the iron grip of the Oni with every shred of strength she had left.

Himiko hesitated, and looked over her shoulder. For a moment, Lara had almost been hopeful that she'd reached Sam after all.

"Put the child out of her misery," Himiko ordered coldly, and turned away.

Lara listened to the footsteps of the Sun Queen and her Stormguard contingent fade away into silence, her heart hammering in her chest. The blade at Lara's throat cut withdrew as the Oni heaved her to her feet, moving to string her up like all of their other victims.

_Just like all those other poor bastards they tortured to death._

Images flashed to mind, reminding her of the rows and rows of dead soldiers in the monastery, the larder filled with bodies that had been hung to preserve their meat a little better, and the bodies strung up in the trees by the windmill in the shanty town...

One of the Oni's grip shifted as it moved to lift Lara into the air. She lashed out against the weakened grasp, wrenching her arm free before slamming herself back to throw the other two Oni off balance. Freeing her other arm with a groan, Lara whirled, her mind working as she tried to assess the best way to tackle the situation.

Her entire body was one giant mass of pain, but adrenaline had kicked in again and she'd always fought the hardest when cornered.

Slamming her shoulder and hip into the Oni that had been standing immediately behind her, Lara forced it to take a backward step to steady itself. Her vision blurred alarmingly for a moment, and she regained control of her senses just in time to hear the the slither of steel as the Oni behind her drew its sword.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lara caught sight of her weapons. The Oni would have collected them when she'd been beaten down, though she was surprised that she didn't recall them removing her bow. Keeping her eyes fixed on the Oni advancing on her, Lara darted backwards and snagged her rifle with just a slight fumble. Her gut lurched in warning, and she dodged forwards in an over-the-shoulder roll. She heard the Oni just behind her growl as its blow fell short, and she raised her rifle and unloaded half the remaining magazine into the Oni's head.

Lara didn't waste time feeling victorious about the kill, instead sprinting for the nearest cover - of course it would be the stone coffin that Himiko's first body had lain in - as the remaining two Oni pursued. She lurched behind the cover, pressing herself back hard against the cold stone. She tried to listen to the Oni's movements over the thundering of her pulse in her ears and the ragged shudder of her own breath, and when the next Oni lept for her, she was ready.

Tracking the Stormguard's movements with practiced ease, Lara pulled the trigger, unloading the rest of the magazine into the armoured mask and the decaying, partially preserved flesh underneath. It fell heavily and without sound, but the fight was far from over. She was out of ammunition, though, and she scrambled to locate the extra magazine's she'd stowed in her side bag.

The remaining Oni hadn't shown its face to attack Lara since she'd broken free, and as her fingertips grazed the rifle magazine she'd been looking for, she glanced desperately about the darkened tomb. Where was it?

Lara ejected the empty magazine with shaking hands, and as she moved to lock the next in place, she heard the creak of leather above her.

_Shit._

The Oni that had climbed over the Sun Queen's stone coffin to cut her down from above growled like an animal as Lara looked up, and with a hoarse roar she jerked back on the rifle and pulled the trigger. She only just managed to get the angle right, and the chain of bullets tore through leather wrappings and the hideous mask covering the Stormguard's face. The Oni's sword clattered to the ground next to Lara, dangerously close.

_God,_ Lara thought exhaustedly as she slumped back against the cold, stone coffin behind her. _I hate how soundlessly they die._

She waited behind her makeshift cover for a few moments, holding her breath as she listened for the sound of approaching feet that would herald any Oni returning to take her out once and for all. All she could hear was the wind whistling around the mountain outside, and if she strained, the distant rumble of thunder. Deeming that the coast was clear, Lara quickly crossed the tomb to where the Oni had piled all of her weapons. Shouldering her bow, shoving her axe through her belt loop and stowing her guns, Lara crept back out into the quiet, empty monastery.

Himiko had taken the remainder of the Stormguard to help her reclaim the body. While Lara had had no idea of _which_ encampment the body would be in when Himiko had - had she actually read Lara's mind? It hardly seemed real, though at this point she knew she shouldn't have been surprised.

Either way, Lara did not doubt for a moment that Himiko would have each encampment methodically slaughtered until the body was found - and then she'd likely murder the rest, anyway.

_Sam..._ Lara thought as she forced her painful body to break into a lurching run. _If Sam is in there still, then I have to do something._

Lara knew that she needed to warn the soldiers of the storm that was coming their way, and she had to reach the body before Himiko could hide it away again.

Lara clenched her jaw. As much as she wanted to follow and force Himiko back under Sam's control, she knew that the camps had to come first and that maybe, _maybe_ dealing with the body could do the same thing.

It hurt Lara to make the choice, it really did, but she _had_ to prioritise. She sprinted through the silent monastery, the sound of her boots on the dusty rock the only sound for kilometers around as she searched for an exit and a way down from the mountain.

When Lara made it out to the open air, she paused at the edge of the cliff. She shielded her eyes as she looked out over the green expanse of Yamatai. She could see smoke rising from somewhere near the mountain village.

Lara swore softly to herself - had they already located one of the army's camps?

Time was running out then, and more importantly, which camp should she head for? The body of the Sun Queen was just as likely to be held on the interim at any one of them, and she didn't like the gamble. Pressing her hand to her temple, Lara told herself to think like a seasoned archaeologist - like her training. Hell, like Whitman - while the man had had a less than stellar personality, he'd had experience with finding dead monarch's remains.

If _he_ had come to Yamatai later and discovered the body of the original Sun Queen - and after having taken a few photos with it to prove his discovery - what would Whitman then have done?

He would have ensured that the body was taken somewhere secure - Himiko was a key figure of the Yamatai legends, and international interest in the finding would have been huge. Museums all over the world would be wanting a chance to take advantage of the Sun Queen, to say nothing of historians willing to grease a few palms just for a chance to get in on the action.

So the body would have not only been taken somewhere secure, but somewhere it could have been easily shipped off to Japan. Lara turned her gaze toward the base camp that the army had set up on the beach, her stomach churning.

It was an educated guess, but a guess all the same.

Himiko would work her way down to it as the Stormguard methodically searched and slaughtered. She was an ancient queen - and no matter how many of Sam's memories she dug up, she would not have access to the same information or be able to draw the same conclusions that Lara was able to.

_It may just be the only thing I have going for me,_ Lara told herself, before beginning to search for the quickest way down the mountain. She couldn't afford to waste any more time.

###

_Sam had opened her eyes, and she'd known immediately where she was. The wooden palace was the same place as it had been every other time - decrepit, silent, and lonely. The whole palace creaked dangerously as the usual storm raged outside, and she pressed her palm against the splintered wood of a doorframe. Sam wondered if, this time, the whole structure would come down on her for good. Maybe, if it did, it would mean that Himiko won forever._

_Himiko had dragged Sam under, reaching out to seize control as Sam's hopes for a cure had come crashing down when the the tomb had ended up being empty after all. That meant that Sam had left Lara alone and unsuspecting with Himiko, and Sam had a pretty good idea of just what the Sun Queen wanted to do to Lara._

_The fact that Himiko intended to see Lara die was really just the start of it._

_If Sam closed her eyes and focused - and really put her mind to it - she could hear faint sounds and feel vague sensations. She could hear Lara's voice, like a whisper in her ears, and for a moment Sam thought she felt warm skin under her fingertips._

_Lara._

_Sam turned, only too aware of the way the palace buckled in the storm outside. Maybe she should run, and maybe she could search for that safe room that she'd found. That room had calmed Sam and protected her, and maybe it was the one last refuge against Himiko's power._

_Sam had to wake up, though. She couldn't keep hiding from what had happened to her, and what Himiko would do to everyone. People were going to get hurt, and Lara was going to die - unless Sam did something to put a stop to it._

_The red thread around her hand pulled tight as Sam's attention fell on it, as if responding to her decision. The string bit deeply into Sam's fingers, the manifestation of Himiko's soul-bonding magic begging her to give in._

_Sam didn't have anything left to lose, and she began to follow the trail of thread deeper into the Sun Queen's palace._

###

It felt like it took Lara far too long to make the descent down to the Shipwreck Beach, but short of sliding halfway down a mountain - something that Lara was actually not so eager to risk on a third attempt - she knew that she couldn't have made the trek any faster.

After Lara had squeezed her way through a narrow gap in a cliff face overlooking the beach, and skidded down another steep rock face, the base of operations that the Japanese army had set up finally came into view. Lara didn't stop to take a moment to regain her breath, pushing herself into a loping, weary run across the freezing beach. While the base seemed safe enough from the Oni, there were no guarantees that it would remain so, if Himiko had her way.

Warning whoever was in charge of the looming danger was Lara's first port of call - even if she understood that she had not exactly gotten off on the right foot with the army during her arrival on Yamatai.

It didn't really come as a surprise, then, that as soon as she approached the seaside base, the soldiers sprang into action. Lara instinctively threw her hands up, trying to make it as clear as possible that she wasn't about to reach for her weapons. The pair of them kept their guns fixed on Lara as she obediently sank to her knees on the sand as ordered and laced her hands behind her head.

Lara knew that she had to seem as nonthreatening as possible - only when the soldiers accepted that would they even consider taking her to whoever was in charge of the Yamatai operations. Lara still had trouble silencing the angry horror of the survivor within her as the soldiers methodically stripped her of all her weaponry, and handcuffed her hands behind her back.

_Do what you have to do. Maybe they'll let you have them all back later,_ Lara thought, trying to calm the instinctive panic inside her while the soldiers hauled her to her feet by the collar of her mud-streaked leather jacket. It all felt a little too much like that first nightmarish night on Yamatai, when she'd been bound, scared and weaponless, but at least she knew that these men were no Solarii and would not kill her on whim alone. Lara forced her rigid muscles to relax, allowing the soldiers to march her on toward the base.

"Please, can I talk with the commanding officer of the Yamatai operations?" Lara asked over her shoulder, directing her question to the stoic-faced man grasping her right arm as they moved across the bleak, grey beach. "It's very important - the Sun Queen, Himiko, she's alive and she-"

Lara cut herself off as she felt the grip on both of her arms tighten at the mention of the words "Sun Queen", and she stumbled slightly as they both froze for half a beat. The pair of them exchanged words in Japanese, far too fast and low for Lara to have any hope of translating, and their entire bearing changed. They went from professional apathy to cold anger in the space of a breath, and that sent off alarm bells in Lara's mind.

Somehow, Lara knew, she'd royally messed up her chances of seeing the highest-ranking officer. She couldn't help the choking terror that welled up in her chest, and she threw herself back against the iron grasp on her arms as hard as she could manage. Escaping, regrouping and trying to find Himiko's body before the Oni, even without the help of the soldiers, was vastly, _massively_ preferable to getting locked up in a cell while the Stormguard marched on the camps.

No matter how Lara fought and begged for the soldiers to just _listen_ to her, nothing she did seemed to have any effect on them. She still struggled as hard as she could as they forcibly marched her into the quiet of the compound and base.

Even in her state of full-on panic, Lara realised that the base was much quieter than it had been during her first visit, but the tension inside had heightened to a point that it was suffocating. That change only frightened Lara further, and she desperately wished she had some intel on what had been going down with the army while she'd been trying to deal with Sam and Himiko in the monastery.

The soldier who had taken all of Lara's weaponry and gear split off as the other soldier shoved her into a darkened room on her left. She could feel her own breath grate harsh against her ears while she spun, struggling to regain her bearings in the sudden blackness. The doorway to the brightly lit hallway slammed shut and locked with a click before she could make a break for it again, and Lara felt her heart sink.

She closed her eyes for a moment, her mind racing as she tried to think of some way to deal with the situation. What would Roth have done?

Laughter started up from one of the darkened corners of the room - the laughter was high-pitched, breathless, and undeniably insane. Lara's heart felt like it froze in her chest for one terrifying breath, and she only relaxed with she heard the rattle of chains as the man - whoever he was - pulled uselessly against whatever bar he'd been cuffed to.

_Shit,_ Lara thought, her eyes still struggling to resolve her fellow prisoner from where he sat in the dark. He continued to mutter under his breath as Lara's own tense silence stretched on.

It was something about _saving her_ , Lara's grasp of Japanese told her, and it was about glory and sacrifice. His voice grew louder, more slurred and more insane as she listened to him, until at last he was ranting at the top of his lungs about the Sun Queen's wrath and the day of judgement.

The pieces clicked into place - the soldier's reactions to hearing Lara speak of the Sun Queen, and her fellow prisoner's rantings. Lara realised in dawning horror that the army didn't just see her as an outside threat who had gone haring off on her own on an island filled with corpses and booby traps - they thought she'd gone mad. They thought that she was just another person to fall victim to whatever brand of unique insanity the island infected people with!

If they thought she was crazy, then they'd dismiss every warning Lara had to give. They'd just keep her locked up in this room, cuffed and ignored, until she could be shipped off to Japan again and dealt with properly. At least, until the Stormguard fell upon the unprepared base and laid that plan to rest.

Lara knew that she had to get out of there, but she really had no idea how much time she had to come up with a working plan of action and carry it out. She couldn't become daunted by the enormity of the task before her - she had to take it one bit at a time.

With some maneuvering, effort and more than a little pain thanks to both her tender treatment at the hands of the Stormguard and the shackles about her wrists, Lara managed to crouch and pass her arms under her legs so that they were in front of her and therefore much, much more useful to her.

Lara carefully removed a bobby pin from her hair, and then looked down at the flimsy piece of metal resting in the palm of her scratched-up hand. She wasn't entirely sure if Roth's old trick would work with the cuffs she wore, but she still had to make the attempt. She just had to be careful, slow and smart about it...

###

_Sam eventually found herself outside the huge palace doors again. They were exactly the same as what she recalled from her brief time under Mathias' rule. Her fingertips brushed the splintered wood and fading paint, but even though she was there, she still continued to hesitate._

_She knew exactly what lay beyond those doors - rotting flesh and exposed bone._

_The idea of coming face to face with that monstrosity once more terrified Sam beyond all words, but on the other hand, she could hear the storm raging. With every gust of wind and roll of thunder, the ancient palace came that much closer to collapsing for good. Sam didn't know how much time she had left before the storm - Himiko - finally did her in._

_Sam felt so tired now, and the lethargy made her limbs feel heavy and dead. She'd fought Himiko's soul for so long - realistically, she had to wonder how much fight she had left in her._

_Lara would not have given up, and she'd faced steeper odds and lost far more than Sam ever had. She also knew, right down to her very core, that Lara would not have given up on her either._

_If there was anything that Sam could do, then it was to match Lara's stride until the very end. She owed that much to Lara - her best friend, her saviour, her _everything_._

_It still took every last scrap of courage that Sam could muster before she was able to push against the huge, wooden doors. With a straight back and a deep breath, Sam walked into the throne room to end things - one way or another._


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Lara continues to search for the original body of the Sun Queen, time is running out for Sam. It's crunch time for them both - and there will be no more second chances.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thanks to [fmorgana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fmorgana) and [Accidental_Overlord](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Accidental_Overlord) for their work as the A-Team.

It took Lara five destroyed bobby pins before she was finally able to spring the locking mechanism using Roth's trick. With every failed attempt and every minute that passed, she had grown more and more tense. With all the muttering, ranting and outright shrieking going on in the corner of the room and that delightful feeling of impending doom, it was a wonder that Lara had been able to focus at all.

Around halfway through, when Lara had wrecked another bobby pin beyond recognition and hurled it to the ground with an expletive, she'd been sorely tempted to tell the man that Himiko's current vessel and his precious harbinger was a media student from UCL with some dodgy grades at best. Thankfully, the man had lapsed into one of his silent stretches, and Lara had been able to get back to work.

Finally free of the handcuffs, Lara slowly rose to her feet, not exactly eager to set her fellow prisoner off and bring the guards running. When she was certain that the man was more preoccupied with whatever fire-and-brimstone fantasies playing out in his head than with her, Lara slunk toward the door and began to work on the lock.

She managed the door more easily than the handcuffs - perhaps due to the way her hands had finally steadied thanks to her previous success. Eventually, she quietly turned the doorknob and cautiously checked the bright hallways beyond.

Nobody was paying Lara any mind, and if possible, there were even fewer soldiers within the base than before. Where had they all gone? She could hear shouting coming from the beach outside, and toward the end of the base's long, sterile corridor, Lara could see soldiers and researchers moving quickly. Lara allowed the door to click shut behind her, and she waited until the last of the soldiers vanished before she began to move.

If there was shouting and possible evacuations going on, then it seemed likely that word had come through from the other camps about the attacks. Did the army understand what they were fighting? Did they understand that the Oni were both more and less than human, that they could take half a magazine to the chest and still keep coming at you? That they were smart, and worse, that they were organised?

Lara quickly located her confiscated weaponry in a nearby room, and the weight of Roth's handgun in her hip holster had an immediate calming effect. She took a few moments to restock her dwindled supply of ammunition, before creeping back into the open corridors. She could still hear shouting from outside, but as of yet, there was no gunfire.

That meant Lara still had a little time left in which to rip the rug from under Himiko, provided her gamble paid off and that the body was on the beach after all.

If the commanding officer was where Lara thought he would be - controlling the defenses and managing the potential evacuation of the non-combatants - then his office would have been left unguarded. Instead of searching the whole base for Himiko's body, Lara would bet good money that there was a map of some description that could start her on the right track.

Ten minutes of frenzied searching later - including those all-too-frequent interruptions as Lara had dodged detection by worried-looking soldiers running down the corridors - she found herself outside the office of the general in charge of the operation.

Not bothering to take the time to note the general's name, Lara pushed her way into the office. The desk had been left in disarray, as if its owner had been reviewing documents but had then left in a hurry. Lara doubted that anything less that an emergency would have forced the officer to leave it like that.

She quickly crossed the room, her eyes already scanning the documents spread out across the desk's surface. Inventory lists, reports on findings, boat schedules, old log books from Solarii and past inhabitants - but nothing substantially useful. Lara opened the set of drawers at the desk's side, rifling through its contents and looking for some sort of itemised map of the compound's layout.

"Stop right where you are," a voice cracked like a whip from the doorway. Lara froze, still in the midst of checking a promising-looking binder. It seemed like the general had returned after all, Lara noted as she dropped the file and slowly put her hands in the air.

The general was middle-aged, his hair greying and his face comprised of harsh, wind-burned lines that reminded her of Roth. From the handgun he had pointed at Lara's head, though, he looked none too happy to find her searching his office.

She had to act quickly, or she'd find herself right back where she'd started.

"I can explain." Lara floundered for the correct Japanese form under the pressure, but it seemed like it was all for naught as the man simply stepped closer, looming before her.

"Silence. I will not be robbed by a girl, not now, not in the middle of -" the officer cut off, and his eyes were cold. Lara seized on what little information the man had let slip in his obvious stress, more than willing to use any advantage she could.

"You're under attack," Lara finished for him, and the way the man's dark eyes had flickered told her enough. "I was on my way to _warn_ you about it, but your soldiers locked me up."

The man's eyes narrowed, and he shoved his gun closer to Lara's face. It took all she had not to flinch or reach for her own gun, but somehow she succeeded.

"Are you allied with these attackers? Speak."

Lara could not have asked for a clearer invitation.

"My name is Lara Croft. I discovered this island - and I know what nightmares it holds." Recognition flickered across the man's face at her name - it was hardly overt, but she'd use it. "They are my enemy as much as they are yours. They are looking for something, yes, but they will not stop even if they find that thing. They will slaughter everyone on this island. I know that you've seen the bodies all through the monastery in the mountains."

The officer's forehead began to shine with sweat, and he haltingly lowered the gun. Lara could not believe that it had worked - things had to be worse outside than she'd believed.

"Monsters. We are not sure how many, but they came from the shadows. I have lost three camps to them and dozens of men. Do they not die?" the man asked, almost to himself, before shaking his head.

"Take what soldiers and scientists you can, and evacuate Yamatai," Lara told him in a low voice. "Retreat and regroup, but don't leave the bay."

With Himiko at large, Lara was unsure whether the storms would allow the soldiers to leave Yamatai's area entirely. It wasn't a chance that Lara was willing to take, either.

"What of those trapped inland?" the general asked, and the fact that he was even considering taking Lara's advice - better late than never - was more than she'd hoped for.

"Those men, and those researchers... they're already dead. You know the stories - and I bet you've also read the logs of those who were stranded here years ago." For Lara, those written, terrified accounts would be something that she would never forget. "There is something supernatural on this island, and it's started all over again. I've stopped this before - and I've got an idea on how to end it, once and for all."

The commanding officer looked at her directly, as if the weight of the world now rested on his shoulders. After a few moments he nodded slowly, and the lines at the corners of his mouth deepened.

"You were seeking something." He gestured to the desk with his free hand. "Please. Allow me to assist, and then be gone."

"I'm looking for the remains of the first Sun Queen - Himiko. Your researchers would have found her tomb when they examined the monastery, the one high up in the mountains. If I can find the body..." Lara trailed off, suddenly unsure of how to explain her intentions.

"You will destroy it. A sacred part of our history and culture." The general's face looked tired. It was a lot that Lara was asking him to believe and allow, she understood that, but he knew the cost if she was correct.

He let out a long breath. "There is a secure storage facility within the compound near the cliff's wall - where we stored those priceless artifacts and the remains my scientists believed were important. The first Sun Queen's body was among them."

He withdrew a security card from his front pocket and tossed it over to Lara. She caught it without a fumble, and she was already moving for the door, focused on locating the facility. She'd need to do whatever it took to stop things spinning further out of control.

Lara sprinted down the corridors and out of the base, hesitating for a moment as she regained her bearings. In the time it had taken Lara to arrive on the beach and then to break free from the locked room, a storm had engulfed the island. The air felt almost electric as thunder rolled and wind whipped Lara's hair into her face; she shielded her eyes with the back of her hand, and she didn't doubt for a moment that the storm was one of Himiko's.

She could make out a skeleton crew of soldiers struggling to escort a group of researchers down to the dock, and they seemed almost pinned down by the fury of the storm. Out of the corner of her eye, Lara saw tiny lights flare up from atop the cliffs overlooking the beach, and she swore. She didn't have time to shout out a proper warning as the Oni archers loosed their flaming arrows, and the pinpricks of light rained down over the base, the vehicles, and over the group of terrified researchers on the beach.

They were sitting ducks, just waiting for the Oni to pick them all off. Lara knew she would not be able to live with herself if she left those people to die - but doing something to help them would draw attention that she could really do without.

Lara made her choice quickly - maybe she could pull it off if she played her cards carefully. She grabbed her rifle, and with a careful eye and a steady hand, she launched the grenade up the cliff face and silently prayed that she'd judged it correctly. The grenade exploded at the top of the cliff with a boom that seemed almost soft in the fury of the storm, and there were no more arrows.

All around her, Lara heard those wild, animalistic howls as the Oni took notice of her, and she saw shadows flicker along the darkened beach. More than ready for whatever horrors the Oni threw her way, Lara shouted over the storm,

"If you want the Sun Queen so badly, you'd better get to it before I do!"

Satisfied that she'd bought the soldiers enough time to complete whatever evacuations they could, Lara turned and sprinted across the compound, to where she knew the secure locker was located. Already, Lara could hear the crash of armour and snarls as the Oni converged on her position. They were hot on her heels, far too close and most decidedly lacking the same bone-deep exhaustion that dogged Lara's own footsteps. All she needed was a couple of seconds to get to the body first and burn it. That would take care of the Oni, the storms and Sam.

_Sam_ \- for Sam's sake, Lara knew that she had to be right.

She made it to the secure storage room with a few breaths to spare. She couldn't help the way her hands fumbled as she used the general's key card to open the security doors, and as soon as she'd darted inside, Lara had smashed the emergency close button. Anything that could buy her a little time...

As soon as the security doors had slammed shut once more, Lara heard the crack of arrows and the pounding of armoured fists raining against them. It took some effort for Lara to refocus again, with the way the war howls had started up around the entire tiny storage building, but somehow she managed.

Her gaze swept the storage room, desperately seeking something that looked like it could hold the bones of an ancient monarch. A large, steel case caught her eye, partially buried under half-open transport crates. With little care for the priceless artifacts on top, Lara feverishly pushed the boxes to the ground to reveal that, steel case. The container was tightly wrapped in plastic, and while it looked promising, it was still locked up tight.

Lara closed her eyes, fumbling at her belt for her axe. It might take her a little longer than she'd hoped, she reasoned, but she could deal with that so long as the security door held.

She looked up suddenly, her heart hammering in her chest and her mouth going dry. It had suddenly grown quiet - much, much too quiet. Lara took a wary step around the Sun Queen's case, her eyes narrowed and fixed on the door. Something was happening out there, but what?

The hair rose on the back of Lara's neck, and she hurled herself to the ground as thunder cracked, incredibly loud and frighteningly close. The steel security door exploded inward in a shower of molten metal and hot sand, and Lara swore as fragments of rock rained down over her. Her ears rang and her head began to swim alarmingly, and she pressed a shaking hand to her forehead and tried to focus. God, it was difficult to hold herself upright, let alone climb to her feet the way she knew she needed to.

The smell of smoke hung in the air, and Lara could hear the crackle of flames. Taking hold of the steel case, Lara hauled herself to her feet with a low, painful cry and took hold of her rifle with shaking hands. She'd moved just in time to see two Oni dart through the hazy smoke and fire, and into the tiny storage room.

_Just two,_ Lara told herself as she opened fire on the nearest Oni, clenching her jaw as it hunkered down behind the sturdy shield in its hands and continued to advance on her. _You can deal with two, Lara._

As the nearest Oni came within striking range, Lara sidestepped the sharp, forward jab from its polearm. Taking advantage of the tiny window of opportunity she had as the Oni overextended, Lara whipped her axe across the Oni's face, tearing both the leather battle mask and the steel-plated helmet free. In the split second that the Oni reeled from the blow, Lara grabbed her handgun and unloaded a rapid fire burst into the Oni's temple.

No matter what magic Himiko had used to keep the Stormguard alive for so long, Lara thought in satisfaction as the Oni fell backward, a bullet to the brain ended them just as surely as it did a Solarii. The handgun was out of ammo though, and Lara shoved it back in her holster just in time to turn to deal with the other Oni.

She stumbled her dodge as the next Oni attempted to ram her with its shield, and she impacted painfully against the storage cupboards lining the room. A little winded but still struggling desperately, Lara slammed her palm heel into the Oni's face, knocking the helmet aside. Heedless of her blow, the Oni lifted Lara full off the floor by the collar of her jacket and slammed her back into the cupboards hard enough to make the cheap plywood shatter from the impact. Lara ripped her axe across the Oni's face, and as the creature's grip sprang open in surprise, she landed on her feet, whipped her axe back again and brought the blade down to bury it in the Oni's temple.

With a sense of crushing relief, Lara watched the Oni crumple to the ground and lay still. It had been a close one - but why had the Oni not immediately moved to gut her and take her life? Lara didn't have time to ponder that mystery as she only narrowly avoided being skewered by the flaming arrow that buried itself into the fractured doors of the wooden cupboards behind her.

Lara immediately took cover behind the steel case that held the Sun Queen's body, stowing her axe at her belt and grabbing hold of her rifle. After having overrun four army camps, and having killed a number of Oni herself, Lara began to wonder how many Stormguard Himiko still had at her disposal. Surely, Lara thought as she opened fire on the next shadow to dart through the flames, if Himiko was able to summon more Oni, she would have done so initially.

She cursed as her supply of rifle ammunition abruptly ran out. In the precious moments that it took to throw the weapon down and grabbing her shotgun, three more Oni flitted inside.

The first few shotgun rounds ricocheted harmlessly off of their broad shields, but by chance alone, Lara's fourth shot caught the nearest of the Oni on the shoulder. Its guard lowered for just a moment, and she took full advantage of it as she darted forward, belting the oni across the face with the stock of her shotgun before unloading a round at point-blank range into its jaw. Lara pivoted sharply to avoid the retaliating, wide slash from the Oni to her left, but the weapon spun in its hands and it brought the heavy, wrapped handle of the naginata across her face.

Lara saw only white for one terrifying instant, and she felt herself stumble backwards. She could feel her breath ragged in her ears as the Oni stepped forward again, seeming unbelievably fast as she continued to reel from the blow to her face. Instead of the Oni burying the blade of the naginata deep inside her gut as she'd expected, it simply slammed the wooden pole against the shotgun still desperately clenched in Lara's hands.

The gun went spinning into the corner of the smoking storage room, and Lara reached out desperately for it while the nearest Oni seized her by the front of her shirt and jacket and hurled her bodily to the ground on the other side of the steel case.

Dazed and barely able to summon the strength to rise to her elbows through the white-hot pain coursing through her body, Lara groaned and forced herself to keep moving regardless. She had to destroy the body.

Lara reached for her side pouch, her fingertips searching for one of her last grenades. Using it in the narrow storage room wasn't the way she had wanted to end things. Of course it would destroy the body - but she knew that she wasn't likely to survive the blast, either.

Her jaw hardened as she heard the scuff of the Oni's feet on the concrete floor as they approached. In the end, Lara knew that she was out of choices. As the Oni above her roared and reached down, she grabbed for the grenade. Halfway to pulling the pin, an armoured foot slammed down from above, pinning her wrist to the blackened concrete mercilessly. She bit back a cry as the Oni shifted its weight - god, it felt like her wrist was breaking under there - and it kicked away the unused grenade contemptuously.

Lara watched the grenade - her last chance - roll away into the corner of the room, feeling an overwhelming sense of cold despair rise up. That was it. She had nothing _left_.

The two remaining Oni wrenched her arms behind her back, and they marched her out of the storage facility and into the wildness of the storm outside.

The wind-driven rain was freezing against Lara's hot skin, but she found she no longer had enough strength to care. Ahead of them, a figure in white walked through the storm. Lara didn't need divine powers to know that the woman, stark against the lightning, was Himiko.

###

_The decaying corpse on the throne was gone, and really, that should have relieved Sam. She approached the head of the throne room cautiously, only too aware of the way the old floorboards creaked under her feet in the dead silence of the empty hall._

_There was a pile of brightly coloured silk strewn about on the ground near the elaborate displays, and Sam felt her stomach sink as the details began to resolve themselves._

_She guessed she knew where the corpse of the Sun Queen had gone._

_It looked like it had managed to take a few steps from the elevated and decorative throne, before finally crashing down. Maybe it had been able to crawl a short distance too, but when it had stopped, it had stayed there for good. The body had thrown out an arm, as if clawing for something in the distance, and with a sharp intake of breath, Sam realised that the red, silken ribbon that had been entangled in the very flesh and bone of that hand had just vanished altogether._

_The vessel had been freed - no longer was it a puppet of the Sun Queen. Sam couldn't help but feel just a little resentful that the vessel's freedom had come at the price of her own._

_Sam jumped at the sound of silken robes shifting, and she turned sharply to stare. The throne at the head of the room had somehow become occupied by the Sun Queen again, and the woman was dressed in elaborate, white silken robes. In one moment, she wore Sam's own face, and in the next, as her expression shifted, Sam could see an exposed, grey skeleton just beneath the surface._

_Himiko smiled using Sam's face, and raised her string-wrapped hand. Sam seized her own threaded hand, helpless as it moved at Himiko's whim. She tangled her free hand in the string, pulling at it desperately as she tried to remove it, tried to snap it, anything -_

_Himiko just laughed at Sam as she yanked back on the thread as hard as she could._

_"You cannot break the bond of fate," Himiko told her._

_Exhausted as she was, and so clearly helpless, Sam really believed at Himiko was right after all._

###

Himiko's lip curled as she looked down at where Lara had been forced to kneel in the rain and mud, and Lara met her glare for glare through her sodden bangs. Lara knew that lowering her eyes or looking away would mean she had ceded something vital to Himiko - it would mean that she'd given up. While she still had breath left in her body, Lara would never give the Sun Queen that satisfaction.

Lightning cracked overhead, lighting up Himiko's face in cold, harsh-set angles. In that moment, Lara saw the Sun Queen's eyes narrow in barely masked rage as she understood it for what it was - defiance. Himiko turned sharply, looking out across the ocean and into the seemingly endless stormy skies beyond.

"Use her life and her soul to strengthen your might as the swords of Yamatai," Himiko said to the Oni that held Lara down. Her voice was disaffected and flat in spite of the unstable rage in her eyes, as if Lara was already dead as far as she was concerned. "Be certain that she dies this time."

As she felt the Oni wrench her arms back more forcefully and heard the slither of steel sliding free from its sheath by her ear, Lara bit down on her lip to stifle her painful groans as she fought back against the iron hold on her. She couldn't let Himiko win - she had to do _something_. With no more weapons or tricks, what exactly did Lara have left?

_I have myself,_ Lara thought desperately. _I have my knowledge of Sam, Himiko and Yamatai._

"What exactly do you plan now?" Lara demanded over the rumble of thunder above them, and from her position on the ground, she could see Himiko's head tilt back as if savouring the fury of the storm around them. "You've killed an entire island full of people, Himiko! What are you going to do when the world turns its eyes to what you've done here and decide to end you once and for all?"

Himiko didn't turn, and for a few tense moments, Lara was convinced that she wouldn't rise to the bait.

"The message we have sent to the _world_ is clear." Himiko's voice was as hard as steel as she looked to Lara over the white, silken fabric draping her shoulder. "The Sun Queen has returned, and the world will fall at my feet and worship."

There it was, that boundless, bone-deep arrogance that Lara had come to know of the Sun Queen - the same pride that had led her to believe she had a right to rule forever, rather than pass on in the night like everyone else.

Suddenly, it all seemed clear to Lara, like all the moves to checkmate were mapped out in vivid detail in her mind's eye. If Himiko could take control when Sam had become unstabilised and fragile up in the monastery, then why couldn't the reverse be true? Lara's eyes narrowed as her jaw firmed. Maybe there was a way to win, after all.

"The _world_ has practically forgotten that Yamatai and the Sun Queen ever existed! A far as they are concerned, you were less than a myth!" Lara's voice snapped out over the wind, and she scrambled to find the most damning words and facts that she could. "The world will not see some long lost queen retaking the world stage. They are just going to see just another of Yamatai's blood thirsty murderers, and they'd be dead right."

There was a rigidity to Himiko's spine that had not been there before. "Strength is respected in every land and court. It is needed to guide the world to a better age. The storm gathers, and I will no longer be denied."

"Are you really so arrogant, to believe you can conquer the world once more without knowing a damn thing about it?" Lara shook her head, as if unbelieving. She didn't lower her eyes from Himiko's back, willing the woman to turn around and see the truth. "You ran back to Yamatai at first chance like some cowering dog, because without the knowledge you need to survive in this world, you're powerless. Compared to all that you were, you and your storms amount to cheap _parlour tricks._ "

Himiko turned to Lara then, her dark eyes boring into Lara's own as she loomed above.

"My light once stretched across the seas and touched all of the known world. I will seize it once more, by power and divine right." Himiko's voice was even, but Lara could hear an undercurrent of tautness to her tone.

"Divine _right_? You have all of two Stormguard left to you, and you spent the rest of them taking out a skeleton operation on a deserted island and _me_. How exactly did you plan to conquer the new world, when you have no army left and but a fraction of your old power?"

That dart hit the bullseye, and Himiko lunged forward, grabbing Lara's face and chin in a bruising grip. Lara tried not to flinch at the contact, and it was still so hard not to see Himiko's face as Sam's. She tried to galvanise her thoughts as Himiko undoubtedly reached into her mind once more - she tried to make the Sun Queen see the truth of what Lara was telling her. As she watched emotion flicker across Himiko's face in rapid succession, Lara knew that it was working.

Himiko was a vain, arrogant woman, and Lara's blows to that pride and her knowledge of her ruined legacy was getting under her skin and unbalancing her just enough. The fact that the Oni had not moved to take Lara's head spoke volumes - of weakness in Himiko's soul, and that Himiko was no longer in control of the situation.

"Your time should have ended with your first death! Instead you prolonged your life, swapping from vessel to vessel, growing more and more arrogant and selfish!" Lara knew that her arguments were growing far too personal, far too much about what Himiko had done to Sam, but she couldn't stop. "It was not your _right_ to steal their lives! It was not your _right_ to end the people of Yamatai with your storms and rage when you found yourself unable to cheat death again! It is _your_ fault Yamatai fell, and it is your fault that it was forgotten, all because you were selfish enough to try to rule forever!"

"Those girls were pawns." Himiko was angry as she pulled back, and Sam's features had been transformed into a rigid mask of hate and anger. That was the frightening rage that Lara had recalled, insanity under a veneer of a calmness as bonds of magic picked Lara up and dangled her above the ground. The bindings were weaker than Lara recalled from the burned out palace, but they were enough.

"Sam was my _friend_. She had a life of her own. She had dreams and things that she loved -" Lara choked, her throat growing tight as she glared down at the woman wearing Sam's face. Lara had loved Sam. For all her flaws, Sam had been worth a thousand of Himiko, and she was in there, somewhere, compromising all of Himiko's strength and eroding her unconscious conviction. That was why Himiko kept giving Lara chances to live and join her cause, why Himiko had let her speak, and that was why the Oni had not put her down. Sam had been saving Lara's life in the only way she could.

"I love her. With everything I've got. She's unimaginably strong, even if she doesn't understand it! And you... You are weak, struggling, prideful and ignorant, and you said it yourself. _The weak are consumed by the strong_." Lara bared her teeth in a smile, feeling a deep ache start up in her chest as she imagined Sam's victory and Himiko's final fall. She just wished she'd be around to see it.

"Killing you will be such _pleasure,"_ Himiko said, her voice like ice. She met Lara's glare, and her expression was merciless, mad and hungry as her hand had formed a claw. The Sun Queen's magic constricted about Lara's throat in a frighteningly familiar way, and then Himiko's eyes unfocused for just a moment.

Lara's breath hitched, and desperately, she called Sam's name as Himiko's magic faltered and she crashed to the rain-soaked sand.

###

_Sam stared down at the red thread knotted tightly about her hand. She couldn't break the thread - it might as well have been wire. She couldn't untangle it either, and with the way the throne room shook and the wooden slats began to peel away from the roof above them, Sam knew that she was out of time to try. Just a few paces ahead of her, Himiko was smiling and reclining on her throne like she had all the time in the world._

_The Sun Queen looked confident and pleased. There was a sick intensity to her eyes that made the hair on the back of Sam's neck prickle and her skin crawl. Himiko was more than content to wait for the storm around them to bring Sam down - all it would take was a little time._

_Sam's eyes flickered over to the red thread that bound her inextricably to the Sun Queen, and then to the thread around Himiko's own wrist. If Sam was bound by the string and there was no way to undo it, then it looked like Himiko was caught just as fast. With the whole place coming down..._

_Sam clenched her jaw, trying not to feel so afraid of what she was about to do, but she wasn't like Lara. She couldn't be fearless and it felt like she'd made one mistake after another ever since coming home from Yamatai. She still had to do something with what little time she had left - and it had to be something that Himiko would not expect._

_She was sick of being a puppet._

_With a sharp twist of her wrist, Sam wound the thread tighter around her hand and grasped it with everything she had. She couldn't afford to wait and let Himiko dictate the rules of their final confrontation, and she sprinted for where the Sun Queen lounged on her ornate wooden throne._

_As she darted forward, closing the distance between them in moments, Sam saw Himiko's eyes flash blue. Above them, the roof of the palace tore away to reveal the blackened, lightning-streaked sky. Sam kept going - she couldn't stop, and she couldn't be afraid anymore._

_Sam impacted with Himiko as the wind tore at them both, wrapping the red thread tightly about them both and binding them together. If Sam was going down, then she was going to take Himiko with her. The dead queen tore at her face with fragmenting, skeletal hands, but Sam wrapped her arms tightly about Himiko and embraced her fully._

_The red thread grew white hot around Sam's hand, and she wasn't sure if it was Himiko screaming or her. The palace tore away around them, and the world was plunged into darkness._

###

Lara sucked in a wheeze through her tortured throat, and she looked up wildly to see Himiko's entire body shudder.

When the Sun Queen finally raised her head, her dark eyes soft, apologetic and _human_ \- it was then that Lara knew for certain that it was Sam.

"Sam," Lara croaked out, trying to struggle to her feet and stumble forward. Sam just shook her head, the movement only barely perceptible as she looked over to the Oni behind Lara. Their swords were still drawn, and still levelled at Lara's unprotected back, but they hadn't moved a muscle since Lara had begun to argue with Himiko.

"Stand down," Sam told them, her voice both calm and commanding. Lara jerked as she heard their armour clank and shift as they sheathed their weapons sharply. She shook her head as she stared over her shoulder, unsure how to feel. Were the the Stormguard actually following Sam's orders?

She didn't want to know what that meant.

The Oni rigidly stood at the ready as they awaited the Sun Queen's next command. Seemingly satisfied they would no longer be a threat, Sam then looked down to Lara. The storms had started to clear overhead; she just smiled, and then nodded to the smoking storage facility behind Lara.

"Go on, Lara. Do what you need to do. They will not stop you, and neither shall I."

There was a particular resonance to Sam's voice that sent a horrified chill down Lara's spine, and doubts reared up in her head again. Was it Sam in control, or was it some bastardised version of them both? Just how tangled together were they, now? Lara took a halting step toward her best friend, wavering between wariness and the urge to just run forward, take Sam in her arms and reassure herself that it was just _her_ in there after all.

Sam looked both oddly sad and peaceful as she raised a hand. It was like she knew Lara's thoughts and wanted to put a stop to them before Lara could act, and that realisation made Lara's heart hurt so fiercely it stung her eyes.

"Please hurry, Lara," Sam murmured, and it sounded just like goodbye. "End it."

If Himiko and Sam were too entangled, then there was a good chance that burning the body would end them both. Did Sam know that? Was that why she looked so sad? Was it a risk Lara was willing to take, when she'd come so far to make good on her promise?

_I have to. Sam wants this. Himiko needs to be laid to rest, and I have to take that gamble._

Roth had told her that she didn't appreciate the meaning of sacrifice. Lara thought she understood, now.

She took her axe and her torch from her belt with shaking hands, staring down at them as if it was the first time she'd seen them. Her throat had closed over and she was blinking back tears, but this was what she'd come to Yamatai to do. This was what Sam wanted. This was what it _took_ to save her. After all, the world would not stand for another Sun Queen, not after what she'd done today.

Lara set her shoulders and walked through the mud toward the locker, passing by the stock-still Oni who did not so much as twitch a muscle to stop her from severing their hold on eternal life. At the locker's ruined entrance, she paused, looking back over her shoulder and taking a moment to wipe her tears from her cheeks.

"Sam," Lara said. If this really was the end, then there was only one thought on her mind. "Sam, I..."

"I know, Lara." A brilliant smile broke out on Sam's face, and she hugged her elbows through the long, white sleeves. The ancient queen fell away for a moment, leaving only Sam.

"Good," Lara replied, taking a steadying breath and continuing forward. She couldn't keep thinking about the idea of losing her. Maybe she was wrong after all. "Right."

The axe was heavy in her grasp as she crossed the tiny floor of the smoke-filled locker, her eyes fixed on the steel case that had protected Himiko's first body. With one sharp swing of her axe, Lara ripped the lock free, and with the sharpened edge, she began to saw at the plastic bindings.

As the wrapping finally came free, Lara shakily opened the lid. There she was, cradled in soft, fibrous material. The first Sun Queen, Himiko. It was so strange to believe that a crumbling pile of bones could have caused Lara and Sam such grief. It was even stranger to realise that she could have ended this whole saga that first time she'd found herself in the monastery.

"We meet again, Himiko," Lara told the grey bones, not really expecting an answer but feeling like she knew the first Sun Queen well enough to justify a few final words. "I wish I could say I want you to rest in peace, but really, I hope you burn in hell."

With that, Lara lit the torch, and tossed it into the steel crate without any further hesitation. The fibrous material, designed to cushion the body's intended journey back to Japan, lit up like a wildfire. Lara had to step back and raise her forearm to shield her eyes from the heat. She watched the flames hungrily consume the bones for a few moments, before slowly turning to look outside.

The Oni had fallen where they had stood - and with a painful cry, Lara realised that Sam had, too. She sprinted for the blotch of pure white against the sodden sand, her heart feeling like it was pounding in her throat as she skidded to a halt beside Sam. Lara felt to her knees, and she could hear herself begging Sam to wake up, to please be okay.

Sam's face was so still and peaceful though, and Lara barely had the courage to check for a pulse. Somehow she managed, and she pressed her scratched up fingers to the warm skin just below Sam's jaw. She could have cried in relief as she felt a steady tempo flutter beneath her fingertips.

Sam wasn't waking up, though. As Lara looked feverishly about the wreckage-strewn beach, she knew she had to get Sam somewhere safe. Carefully gathering her best friend into her arms, Lara set off further inland.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lara waits for Sam to wake up, and looks at the choices that had brought them both back to Yamatai.

It had been hours since the fight down at the secure storage, and Sam was still no closer to waking up. Lara had finally come to a stop when she'd reached the cover of the nearby forest, and she'd laid Sam down in the shelter of an overhanging rock. Her body trembled with exhaustion and pain, vivid reminders of her lack of sleep and the beating she'd suffered from the Oni up in the monastery and at the secure storage facility earlier that day. The gash on her arm that she'd patched up the day prior had started to grow hot and throb.

As she worked on getting a fire started, Lara's breath hitched a little - she rather suspected that during the last fight, the Oni had cracked a few of her healing ribs again. She kept working through the pain, arranging the dry wood and grass carefully before lighting it. The fire took quickly as it began to devour the wood, and the smoke fortunately lacked the acrid tang of melting synthetic fibre. The smell still clung to Lara's skin and clothing, but it was oddly comforting.

It was a reminder that the Sun Queen's first body was gone, and that the ordeal on Yamatai was finally over.

She rocked back on her heels, wincing when her body complained more and more loudly. She looked over to where Sam lay on her side. Her face was pale, and from where she was crouched, Lara could see a thin sheen of sweat on her brow.

Lara had always considered herself to be a patient person even under enormous pressure - it had been a point of pride at UCL and had only come in handy when things had gone south on Yamatai. She couldn't stand _this_ sort of waiting, though, where she was powerless to resolve anything at all. She needed answers, but those would only come when - or _if_ \- Sam awoke.

 _I wish I knew what was going on in there,_ Lara thought a little grimly, and she moved carefully over to Sam's side. This was exactly what she'd been so scared of down on the beach - that Sam and Himiko had become too intertwined for one to exist without the other.

Destroying the body had been a risk Lara had needed to take, as gut-wrenchingly awful as it had been to make that choice. She'd rather see Sam dead than live with the knowledge that she'd been subsumed under Himiko's will for the final time. Lara also knew Sam well enough to understand that her best friend would have preferred to send a final message to Himiko through death. It didn't make the wait any less difficult.

The morbid direction Lara's thoughts had taken disturbed her. With one final check of Sam's pulse and temperature, Lara took hold of her bow and shouldered it. She needed to distract herself from the waiting, and while she was still too exhausted to feel any semblance of an appetite, she figured some food would not go astray.

When Lara returned an hour later, a chunk of venison secured with a length of rope at her side, Sam still hadn't stirred. How much longer would it take before she awoke?

Her gut clenching in growing worry, Lara kept an eye on Sam's face as she thrust an arrow through the chunk of meat she'd brought back with her and set it over the fire to cook.

Lara cautiously sat down beside Sam, hugging her knees up to her chest. She leaned her head on her knees, craning her neck so that she could watch the steady rise and fall of Sam's chest.

_God, Sam... I don't know what I'm going to do if I've failed you after all._

This whole second go around with Yamatai had made things even clearer for Lara. She'd nearly lost Sam yet again, and worse, it had been all her fault. She'd thrown herself into the next adrenaline rush rather than letting herself slowly heal from what had happened on the island. If Lara loved Sam, if she really _felt_ the way she thought she did, then she needed to stop looking for the next distraction or puzzle. Lara needed to show Sam how she actually felt, rather than leaving it to some sort of final confession when she'd been so scared of what burning Himiko would mean.

Lara's breath shook a little when she inhaled, and she closed her eyes. That realisation wasn't one that gave her a great deal of comfort - Sam was still out cold, and maybe she wouldn't wake up. She turned her attention back to the meat over the fire, and tried to think of something happier.

###

It was close to nightfall when Sam finally began to stir. Lara had closed her eyes, her bone-deep exhaustion and pain beginning to get the better of her, but every fiber of her body seemed to come alive when Sam rolled onto her side and began to cough.

Lara was immediately upon her as Sam heaved in gasp after shuddering gasp of air, and her hands were shaking in what she knew to be fear as she took a hold of Sam's shoulder in a gentle, firm grip.

In what felt like a miracle at that point, Sam didn't pull away from Lara's touch as her breath slowly normalised. Her heart in her throat, Lara watched Sam tuck her muddy hair behind her ears. She caught the tremble in Sam's hands, and her heart plummeted.

"Sam?" Lara ventured, wetting her dry lips with a tongue that suddenly felt incredibly parched. "Sam, are you all right?"

Sam still looked pale and shaken as her dark eyes darted up to meet Lara's own. The flood of relief that Lara was almost dizzying - it was Sam in there, not Himiko and not any combination of them both.

 _Just Sam,_ Lara felt the beginnings of a brilliant smile. She wasn't _just_ Sam though, but the person that Lara had been through hell to save. Sam was amazing, brilliant and strong, and against all of Lara's quiet fear, she was back and whole.  
"I... I think so?" She watched Sam frown then, as if turning her attention inwards. "I don't feel..."

There were a few moments of tense silence as Lara waited, her hands frozen on Sam's shoulders. Whatever it was that Sam found - or rather, did _not_ find - made her give Lara one of those wide grins that spoke volumes.

"I don't hate you," Sam said slowly and hoarsely, as if testing out the truth of that statement. Her eyes refocused, snapped up to meet Lara's. "Lara. I _love_ you."

With that, Sam twisted her hands in Lara's jacket and yanked her forward. Lara's eyes went wide as her lips met Sam's in a needy, desperate kiss that seemed designed to prove that Sam _loved her_. Lara's eyes slipped shut as she leaned into the kiss, savouring the feel of Sam's soft and demanding mouth against her own. She felt herself begin to shake when she finally pulled back - god, she'd loved it, but it felt like the straw that had to break the camel's back and she was starting to come apart at the seams.

She'd gone back to Yamatai and faced down the Oni again, she'd had to fight an undead queen using her best friend's body and she'd been so certain that she'd never see anything other than hate in Sam's eyes. Then she'd very nearly lost Sam and -

Lara hugged Sam against her convulsively, burying her face against Sam's warm neck and sucking in a shuddering gasp for air. Her ribs were a mess of pain and her eyes were swimming, but none of it mattered because Sam was all right. She thought she could hear herself apologising - for the first time on Yamatai, for leaving Sam to face Himiko alone, for letting her down at the monastery.

The raw emotion poured out of her like the dam had finally broken, and she couldn't seem to stop.

Sam just held onto Lara. The hold was a little awkward and unsure, but it was _Sam_ , and for now, that was all that really mattered.

###

It took them until the next morning before they were able to summon the energy to face the consequences of their second round on Yamatai. Lara had been half-tempted to lay low on the island while the mess blew over on its own. Sam, on the other hand, had taken one look at her own rather bedraggled appearance, and had requested a return to civilization - pronto.

Lara had laughed at her, and had conceded that she didn't particularly want to stick around Yamatai any longer than she had to, either. On a far more sobering note, she'd heard helicopters move about over the forest canopy above them, and she knew the army was searching the island for the last of the Oni.

 _No,_ Lara had told herself firmly, _It's time to face the music and take it as it comes._

As they'd slowly made their way down to the cliffs overlooking the wreckage-strewn beach, Lara had began to slowly turn plausible stories over in her head. The fact that they were on Yamatai - covertly in Sam's case - just in time for the attack was bad news. Even without solid evidence linking Sam or even Himiko to the slaughter at the bases, the situation was far from ideal. They would need to play their cards correctly, or Sam in particular would be under some heavy scrutiny.

Lara watched the clearing crews working on the partially burned-out base, thoughtful.

"We're going to need a damn good story," Lara said to Sam slowly, and she shot her best friend - god, what _was_ their relationship after that kiss - a smile.

Sam knelt by her side, frowning down at the beach for a few moments before turning her attention back to Lara.

"Don't you get all shy with me." Sam nudged her lightly with an elbow, and there was an intensity to her eyes that did some interesting things to Lara's stomach. "You sound like you've got a plan already figured out."

Lara felt Sam's eyes flick up and down her body, and a slight flush warmed her cheeks as she cleared her throat a little unsteadily.

Maybe it was a little _obvious_ where that kiss had taken their relationship to - not that Lara minded at all.

"You'd be right," she admitted, turning her attention back down to the soldiers swarming the beach and trying to envision her guesses playing out. "Back before the Oni attacked this last camp, I managed to speak with the general in charge of the Yamatai operation. He seemed to believe me when I said that the attack and the storms were supernatural - he might be our best shot when it comes to convincing them we're innocent."

Of course, that plan hinged on the fact that the general hadn't been skewered by an Oni before Lara had drawn their attention. She tried not to think about their chances if he'd been killed after all.

"'Innocent'," Sam repeated, sounding skeptical - and also a little guilty - as she shifted.

Lara chose not to argue the point any further - she'd made her stance on Sam's culpability more than clear before. Instead, she nodded toward the base on the beach.

"When we head down there, they're going to apprehend us. They're likely going to separate and question us before we can even think of being set loose," Lara said, giving Sam a sideways look and trying to read her best friend's expression.

Sam looked incredibly unhappy with the situation Lara had laid out for her, but at that point, things couldn't stay sugar-coated. At least Himiko wasn't in Sam's mind anymore, wreaking havoc on her sense of self and overall stress levels. A Sam that had been still infected with the shards of the Sun Queen's soul would not have lasted long under even the lightest interrogation.

"Our story is this. You were kidnapped by the remnants of the Solarii Brotherhood in some sort of dangerous attempt at resurrecting their fallen idol, the Sun Queen." Lara closed her eyes - the story was true enough. "They took you from Tokyo, chartered the ship under Himiko's name and used your money. When they arrived, they were the ones who killed the crew. The Oni were the last of the Solarii, and as a part of the ritual, they decided on a blood sacrifice. That lead them to launching a final assault on the army."

Sam was silent, her expression unreadable as she tried to digest Lara's quickly-formulated cover story. Was she doubting it?

"With what they know of the Solarii's sacrifices, and what I know they found in the monastery when they cleaned it out, I'm confident that the general will buy the story."

 _It would likely be easier to report on than 'a long dead monarch attacked us with her undead soldiers',_ Lara added, watching Sam continue to turn it over in her head.

She was looking a lot healthier, Lara noted idly, watching her tuck a stray hair behind her ear. The memory of Sam's lips, demanding against her own, rose up unbidden. A little chagrined, she quickly turned her attention back to the army before her stomach could perform any further backflips.

"So I get to be the helpless, useless damsel again," Sam finally said, her voice bitter as she sighed and picked at one of the grass tufts at the cliff's edge. "I guess I know how to play that role super well, considering all my practice."

Lara frowned at her, alarmed at Sam's reaction.

"Sam you have _got_ to be joking." Lara pitched her voice low and urgent, and she reached out to clasp Sam's shoulder. She still looked so hurt and bitter at needing to have been saved from Himiko _yet again_ that Lara knew she had to do something to make things right.

At least with Himiko gone, she knew all that bitterness was Sam's alone.

After a few moments of stubborn silence on Sam's part, Lara held up four fingers and began to tick them off as she continued.

"Sam, you had enough influence over Himiko's soul - the same woman, I hasten to remind you, that bent countless other vessels to her will - that she didn't fry me with lightning every time she laid eyes on me. You fought back _hard_ when I needed you the most at the palace, you did a hell of a job making sure that the Oni didn't just finish me off, _and_ you took back control. You held her back while I burned the body. How, exactly, is that helpless _or_ useless?"

Sam's eyes had gone a little wide by the time Lara had finished, and she seemed at a loss as to what to say.

Lara squeezed her shoulder again, just gently, as she leaned forward to catch Sam's eyes. It really did feel dizzyingly brilliant to have Sam look at her with open affection instead of all that venomous hatred.

"If not for what you did, I would be dead ten times over. Don't you dare sell yourself short." Lara wet her lips, tilting her head and letting herself smile as Sam finally nodded. "Play the role, but don't forget that this time, _you_ saved _me_."

She stood with a groan, dusting her filthy knees off quickly before offering Sam a helping hand. Sam stumbled a little, and Lara caught her shoulder impulsively to steady her. Almost inexorably, her eyes fell on the curve of Sam's lips, and her breath seemed to freeze in her throat.

For a few tense seconds, Lara wondered if it would be all right to just -

Sam made a frustrated sound in her throat, rolling her eyes, as if she knew exactly what Lara had been considering.

"You, Lara, are _impossible,_ " she said with a long-suffering sigh, before leaning forward and pressing her lips against Lara's.

The kiss was both breathy and a little shaky, and Lara's eyelids fluttered closed as Sam brushed the hair back from her cheek with the back of her hand. Everything else - the army, the pain and the lingering sense of exhaustion - faded away.

When Lara felt Sam's teeth nip down gently and a tongue run along the line of her lower lip, a hot-cold shiver ran up her spine.

"If you're right," Sam told her softly when she finally pulled back, her fingers still tangled in the hair at the back of Lara's neck. She was still so _close,_ though. "Then this is goodbye for now."

Lara's heart was still pounding in her ears and her breath was just a little short as she brushed Sam's cheek with her thumb. She really couldn't argue with that.

"Total dibs on you afterward, though." Sam's grin was both weary and affectionate, and it made it more than clear _exactly_ what she had in mind when everything was sorted out.

"I'm - I'm really glad you're back, Sam." Lara felt her own smile grow a little crooked, and they set off.

Sam didn't reply as they left the cliff overlooking the beach, but from the set of her shoulders, Lara's words had galvanised her into a quiet sort of confidence. The expression reminded her just a bit of that calm, commanding air Sam had borne just before Himiko's first body had been burned.

_It... it **is** just Sam left in there, isn't it?_

She had no further time to dwell on that final stray thought as the first of the soldiers noticed their approach with frantic yells.

**Author's Note:**

> And so on that note, _Gathering Storms_ ends. The ending is definitely up to interpretation - is Himiko actually gone, is she still irrevocably tied with Sam, or has Sam simply learned and grown from her experience on Yamatai: Round Two? 
> 
> Either way, things have calmed down and Sam and Lara both have found a measure of stability. 
> 
> This fic has been a WIP for me since mid April, so it's a bit of a relief to finally mark this one as 'complete'. A huge amount of work has been poured into this, sometimes it's been amazing, and sometimes it's been frustrating. I really couldn't have done it without Accidental_Overlord or fmorgana - without their work and input this fic would have been very different. 
> 
> Anyway, to everyone who commented, kudos'd, or just read along - thanks for the ride! I really hope you enjoyed.
> 
> If you'd like updates as to current projects or just want to chat, feel free to come visit me on my tumblr: [zerrat](http://zerrat.tumblr.com/) (personal) and [zerratwritesstuff](http://zerratwritesstuff.tumblr.com) (writing)!


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